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

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: September 15, 2025

Sep 15, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Console Reporting Change Since 100 Results Broke

Sep 15, 2025 - 7:51 am
Bing Search

Bing Places Update Coming Soon: Navigation, Experience & More

Sep 15, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

PSA: Most Third Party Google Search Tracking Tools Are Broken

Sep 15, 2025 - 7:31 am
Search Engine Optimization

Structured Data Does Not Help With Visibility In AI Search

Sep 15, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google News

FTC Investigating Google Over Ad Pricing & Terms On Websites

Sep 15, 2025 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: Google Fixes Meta Tag Verification For Webmaster Tools