• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4
        9
        2291
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • JimJ
          JimJ last edited by

          We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace.  Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content)

          Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done

          I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • JimJ
            JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by

            Hi Gaston

            Thank you for the detailed response and suggestions. I will follow up with my findings. Point 3 and 4; - I think there is something there.

            James

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • GastonRiera
              Gaston Riera @JimJ last edited by

              Hi James,

              Great that you've checked out those items and there aren't errors.

              I'd break my response into bullet points so its easier to respond 🙂

              1- I'm bugged that the traffic loss occurs in the same month as the https redirection. 
              That completely tells me that you've either killed, redirected or noindexed some pages that drove a lot of traffic. 
              2- Also it could be possible that you didn't deserve that much traffic due to either being ranked on searches that you weren't relevant or Google didn't fully understand your site. That often happens when migration takes places, as Google needs to re-calculate and fully understand the new site.

              3- If you have still on the old HTTP search Console property, I'd check as many (and in some scalable way) keywords as possible, trying to find which have fallen out in rankings.
              4- When checking those keywords, compare URLs that were ranked, there could be some changes.

              5- And lastly, have you made sure that there aren't any indexation and/or Crawlability issues? Check the raw number of indexable URLs and compare it with the number that Search Console shows in the index coverage report.

              Best wishes.
              GR

              JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • JimJ
                JimJ @GastonRiera last edited by

                Hi Gaston

                Thank you for sharing your insights.

                1. I have looked through all the pages and made sure we have not noindexed important pages

                2. The migration went well; no double redirects or duplicate content.

                3. I looked through Google search console - Fixed all the errors; (mostly complains about 404 error caused by products that are out of stock or from vendors who leave the website)

                4. A friend said he thinks our pages are over-optimized - and hence that could be the reason; We went ahead and tweaked all the pages that were driving traffic; but change.

                If you have a moment here is our website: www.rebelsmarket.com - If there is anything that standsout please let me know. I appreciate your help

                James

                GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • JimJ
                  JimJ @jasongmcmahon last edited by

                  Hi Joe

                  We have applied all the redirects carefully and tested them to make sure; we have no duplicate content

                  The url:  www.rebelsmarket.com

                  Redirect to SSL: March 2018 (we started with the blog and then moved to products page)

                  We added; noindex and nofollow tags at the sametime;

                  Thank you

                  James

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • JimJ
                    JimJ @JohnSammon last edited by

                    Hi John

                    Sorry, I have been tied up with travel schedule. Here is the website www.rebelsmarket.com

                    Thank you for your help John

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • jasongmcmahon
                      jasongmcmahon last edited by

                      Hi James,

                      Yiut issues lie elsewhere - did anything else happen during the update? My first thoughts are that the redirects were incorrectly applied.

                      • Whats the URL?
                      • When was the redirect HTTP > HTTPS installed & how?
                      • When was  noindex and nofollow tags added?

                      You're a month in, so you should be able to recover. Sharing the URL would be useful if you need any further assistance.

                      JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • JohnSammon
                        JohnSammon last edited by

                        Hey James - would you be comfortable sharing the URL? I can run some diagnostics on it to see what other issues could be the cause of the drop.

                        Thanks!

                        John

                        JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • GastonRiera
                          Gaston Riera last edited by

                          Hi James,

                          I'm sorry to hear that you've lost over 45% of your traffic.
                          Absolutely not, having a lot of noindex and nofollow pages won't affect your rankings and your SEO strength.

                          On the other hand, a traffic drop could be related to many issues, some of them:

                          • Algorithm changes, there has been a lot of movement this year
                          • You've noindexed some of your high traffic pages
                          • Some part of the migration gone wrong
                          • And the list could be endless.

                          I'd start checking Search Console, there you could spot which keywords and/or URLs are those that aren't ranking that high.

                          It might come handy, this sort of tutorial on analyzing a traffic drop: How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer - Moz Blog

                          Hope it helps.
                          Best luck.
                          GR

                          JimJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Browse Questions

                          Explore more categories

                          • Moz Tools

                            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                          • SEO Tactics

                            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                          • Community

                            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                          • Digital Marketing

                            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                          • Research & Trends

                            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                          • Support

                            Connect on product support and feature requests.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • yaelslater

                            Conditional Noindex for Dynamic Listing Pages?

                            Hi, We have dynamic listing pages that are sometimes populated and sometimes not populated. They are clinical trial results pages for disease types, some of which don't always have trials open. This means that sometimes the CMS produces a blank page -- pages that are then flagged as thin content. We're considering implementing a conditional noindex -- where the page is indexed only if there are results. However, I'm concerned that this will be confusing to Google and send a negative ranking signal. Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater
                            0
                          • Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.

                            Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
                            0
                          • Neverstop123

                            PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?

                            Hello Moz community I know this question has been asked before but it seems there is no real answer other than putting a summary of the PDF on the HTML page. My problem is other websites are using my PDFs, I have some PDFs with very high authority links and I would like to either pass the link juice on to my product/category page or do rel=canonical somehow. I'm using bigcommerce as my platform. My website is cwwltd.com. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neverstop123
                            1
                          • LiseDE

                            Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?

                            Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
                            Lise

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
                            0
                          • MichaelWhyley

                            Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.

                            Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley
                            0
                          • ieplnupur

                            Is there any effect on ranking if i disable right click on page??

                            Hello , I have site, in which client needs right click on All his pages, his traffic is very Good, But worried, if right click hurts its traffic, ?? any expert can help ?? Thx in Advance

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ieplnupur
                            0
                          • Philip-DiPatrizio

                            Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?

                            If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage?  Nothing?  Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio
                            0
                          • bigtimeseo

                            Should I nofollow the main navigation on certain pages?

                            We have several large Ecommerce sites with hundreds of links on each page. I have been trying to think of ways to focus our internal linking to increase certain pages relevancy. My thought was to put nofollow in the main navigation (since there are hundreds of links there controlled by dropdowns) and only follow the links on each page for the products we are selling and promoting (15-20 links). I would still be using a sitemap that includes the links. Is this a terrible idea? if a link is nofollowed in the main navigation does that still count as the one mention for google if it points to the same page that a normal link points too that is in the content of the page? since all of the main navigation is the same on every page of the website would it be good to only put nofollow on the subpages/subsections and leave the home page navigation alone (that would allow the spiders to crawl all of those links on the home page but not crawl those same links on the subsections where I could then focus the linking).

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigtimeseo
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.