Don't Overlook The Obvious: NoIndex Tag

Dec 9, 2008 - 8:02 am 0 by

For many many cases, when people are having issues with their site's doing well in the search engines - they sometimes overlook the obvious. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen or heard that webmasters are complaining their sites are not in the search indexes, but at the same time, their robots.txt command or meta tags are telling the search engine not to crawl.

For example, a Google Webmaster Help thread shows this exact issue.

Webmaster complains they are not in the index, "This seems to be such an area of voodoo for me - so frustrating!, said this webmaster. In response, a webmaster helper, John, said, "You've got: <meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />."

The webmaster's response, is all to common:

Oh my gosh! I totally forgot about that option in WordPress - thanks for finding it!

Don't overlook the obvious.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: June 17, 2026

Jun 17, 2026 - 10:00 am
Bing SEO

Bing Webmaster Tools AI Reporting Adds Intents, Topics, Citation Share & Compare

Jun 17, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility Continues Into This Week

Jun 17, 2026 - 7:41 am
Google News

CMA: Google Must Share How Search Results Are Ranked & Data Portability

Jun 17, 2026 - 7:31 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Updates Its Campaign Status Interface

Jun 17, 2026 - 7:21 am
Google Ads

Google Ads New Security Tasks Summary Tab

Jun 17, 2026 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: Google Fixes Meta Tag Verification For Webmaster Tools