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.
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
-
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
-
In the situation outline by the OP, these pages are noindexed. There’s no value to clutterig up crawl reports on these pages. Block rogerbot from non-critical parts of your site, unless you want to be alerted of issues, then don’t.
-
Thanks, I'm not concerned about the crawl depth of the search engine bots, there is nothing in your fix that would affect that, I'm curious of the decrease in crawl depth of the site with the Moz as we use that to spot issues with the site.
One of the clients I implemented the fix on went from 4.6K crawled pages to 3.4K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.2K pages.
The other client went from 5K to 3.7K and the fix would have removed an expected 1.3K pages.
TL;DR - Good News everybody, the robots.txt fix didn't reduce the crawl depth of the moz crawler!
-
I agree, unfortunately Moz doesn't have an internal disallow feature that gives you the option to feed them info on where rogerbot can and can't go. I haven't come across any issues with this approach, crawl depth by search engine bots will not be affected since the user-agent is specified.
-
Thanks for the solution! We have been coming across a similar issue with some of our sites and I although I'm not a big fan of this type of workaround, I don't see any other options and we want to focus on the real issues. You don't want to ignore the rule in case other pages that should be indexed are marked noindex by mistake.
Logan, are you still getting the depth of crawls after making this type of fix? Have any other issues arisen from this approach?
Let us know
-
Hi Nichole,
You're correct in noindexing these pages, they serve little to no value from an SEO perspective. Moz is always going to alert you of noindex tags when they find them since it's such a critical issue if that tag shows up in unexpected places. If you want to remove these issues from your crawl report, add the following directive to your robots.txt file, this will prevent Moz from crawling these URLs and therefore reporting on them:
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/*edit - do not prevent all user-agents from crawling these URLs, as it will prevent search engines from seeing your noindex tag, they can't obey what they aren't permitted to see. If you want, once all tag & category pages have been removed from the index, you can update your robots.txt to remove the rogerbot directive and add the disallows for tag & category to the * user agent.
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.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Does Moz Pro include Moz Local
My client has bought about six Moz Local accounts and are pleased with results. We have not yet used your Moz Pro program. The client might be interested in switching to the Moz Pro if those Moz Local accounts can be included into it. Please let me know as soon as possible. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | gallowaywebteam0 -
Moz-Specific 404 Errors Jumped with URLs that don't exist
Hello, I'm going to try and be as specific as possible concerning this weird issue, but I'd rather not say specific info about the site unless you think it's pertinent. So to summarize, we have a website that's owned by a company that is a division of another company. For reference, we'll say that: OURSITE.com is owned by COMPANY1 which is owned by AGENCY1 This morning, we got about 7,000 new errors in MOZ only (these errors are not in Search Console) for URLs with the company name or the agency name at the end of the url. So, let's say one post is: OURSITE.com/the-article/ This morning we have an error in MOZ for URLs OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1 OURSITE.com/the-article/AGENCY1 x 7000+ articles we have created. Every single post ever created is now an error in MOZ because of these two URL additions that seem to come out of nowhere. These URLs are not in our Sitemaps, they are not in Google... They simply don't exist and yet MOZ created an an error with them. Unless they exist and I don't see them. Obviously there's a link to each company and agency site on the site in the about us section, but that's it.
Moz Pro | | CJolicoeur0 -
How crucial are H1 tags and descriptions in wordpress categories?
Hi all Trying to improve SEO for my (mostly) local site, www.nectarbridge.com, and recently got back on Moz Pro account. First crawl of my site by Moz, a manageable number of issues that I've mostly sorted, but the category with the largest number of problems is missing or invalid tags. My content pages and blog posts are not missing the tags. It's category, archives, etc., including multiple pages, ex: https://www.nectarbridge.com/category/blog/page/4/ A smaller number of pages are being flagged by Moz as missing descriptions, and they are also category pages and the like. So the question is - how hard should I pursue fixing these issues? I'm using the divi theme, which apparently doesn't display the category description by default (if it did, that would kill two birds with one stone). There is a fix to add the category description, but before I get into that I'm trying to discern whether this issue really matters greatly to SEO or if I should spend that time just working on more content.
Moz Pro | | gary_nectarbridge0 -
Why Only Our Homepage Can Be Crawled Showing a Redirect Message as the Meta Title
Hello Everyone, So recently when we checked our domain using a Moz Crawl Test and Screaming Frog only the homepage comes up and the meta title says “You are being redirected to…”. We have several pages that used to come up and when submitting them to GSC no issues come up. The robots.txt file looks fine as well. We thought this might be ‘server’ related but it’s a little out of our field of expertise so we thought we would find out if anyone has any experience with this (ideas of reasons, how to check…etc.) or any potential suggestions. Any extra insight would be really appreciated. Please let us know if there is anything we could provide further details for that might. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thanks in advance. Best,
Moz Pro | | Ben-R0 -
Is one page with long content better than multiple pages with shorter content?
(Note, the site links are from a sandbox site and has very low DA or PA) If you look at this page, you will see at the bottom a lengthy article detailing all of the properties of the product categories in the links above. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-s/432.htm My question is, is there more SEO value in having the one long article in the general product category page, or in breaking up the content and moving the sub-topics as content to the more specific sub-category pages? e.g. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Button-Head-Socket-s/1579.htm
Moz Pro | | AspenFasteners
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Cap-Screws-s/331.htm
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Captive-Panel-Scre-s/1559.htm0 -
What to do with a site of >50,000 pages vs. crawl limit?
What happens if you have a site in your Moz Pro campaign that has more than 50,000 pages? Would it be better to choose a sub-folder of the site to get a thorough look at that sub-folder? I have a few different large government websites that I'm tracking to see how they are fairing in rankings and SEO. They are not my own websites. I want to see how these agencies are doing compared to what the public searches for on technical topics and social issues that the agencies manage. I'm an academic looking at science communication. I am in the process of re-setting up my campaigns to get better data than I have been getting -- I am a newbie to SEO and the campaigns I slapped together a few months ago need to be set up better, such as all on the same day, making sure I've set it to include www or not for what ranks, refining my keywords, etc. I am stumped on what to do about the agency websites being really huge, and what all the options are to get good data in light of the 50,000 page crawl limit. Here is an example of what I mean: To see how EPA is doing in searches related to air quality, ideally I'd track all of EPA's web presence. www.epa.gov has 560,000 pages -- if I put in www.epa.gov for a campaign, what happens with the site having so many more pages than the 50,000 crawl limit? What do I miss out on? Can I "trust" what I get? www.epa.gov/air has only 1450 pages, so if I choose this for what I track in a campaign, the crawl will cover that subfolder completely, and I am getting a complete picture of this air-focused sub-folder ... but (1) I'll miss out on air-related pages in other sub-folders of www.epa.gov, and (2) it seems like I have so much of the 50,000-page crawl limit that I'm not using and could be using. (However, maybe that's not quite true - I'd also be tracking other sites as competitors - e.g. non-profits that advocate in air quality, industry air quality sites - and maybe those competitors count towards the 50,000-page crawl limit and would get me up to the limit? How do the competitors you choose figure into the crawl limit?) Any opinions on which I should do in general on this kind of situation? The small sub-folder vs. the full humongous site vs. is there some other way to go here that I'm not thinking of?
Moz Pro | | scienceisrad0 -
Items listed based on size - Use "inches" or " " "
I sell Decorative nutcrackers of various sizes. At this time, I use the term "inches". I was looking at my competitor the other day, and when I did a search on his site, using the term inches did not provide me with a result. I was forced to use ex. "10" nutcracker" instead of "10 inch nutcracker". Is there a preferable usage for seo purposes. Thanks! my site: http://www.nutcrackerballetgifts.com/category/5/10-Inch-Nutcrackers.html his ite: http://www.kurtadler.com/Search?search=10"+nutcracker
Moz Pro | | NutcrackerBalletGifts0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | | kdl01