google now indexing no index,no follow

[bekyed]

Hi,

Has anyone else notices that google is now indexing no index,no follow pages?

Perhaps its just me, but i have checked all our pages with the code on and they are indeed indexed.

Bek

[Marcia]

Are they showing the proper page title and the description snippet, or just the URL as a link and nothing more?

Yes, I've seen some even with a robots.txt exclusion - in the index, but just the URL, nothing more. They'll do that when they find the page through links to it.

[bekyed]

Hmm, this is funny up to today all of my other index pages ie, adwords,overture pages were cached and showed exactly the same index page as the home page.
Now they are not, there is definitely something in the water Marcia.

Bek.

[TravelMan]

AFAIK its actually noindex and/or nofollow.

I recall a similar problem in the past whereby I didn't want google indexing certain pages.

I put in a meta tag <meta name="robots" content="no index"> and google indexed the pages.

I changed it to the correct format of <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> and it duly dropped them.

Maybe this is the cause...

[Chris_D]

I agree with Travelman. Get the syntax right, and it works fine. Choices include:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

[kaled]

Check the source code of the cached page. If there is a correct NOINDEX robots meta present, then you have found a bug.

It's that easy!

Kaled.

[hermosa]

Well I was having the same problem and I was tearing my hair out. I think I may have found the error. I had:

"noindex, nofollow" instead of
"noindex,nofollow"

Believe it or not I cut and pasted the INCORRECT format directly from Google. Scroll down and you will see it:

[google.com...]

[kaled]

Actually, I would be inclined to expect "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" to be ok. I would also expect "NOINDEXNOFOLLOW" and "NOINDEX NOFOLLOW" to be ok.

Reason : Code simplicity. All that is required is to look for the keywords. Worrying about punctuation is a waste of CPU time.

However, if the implementation uses higher level code that looks for delimited words within a string, correct syntax would be important.

Kaled.

[Tropical Island]

I use a landing page for my FindWhat PPC which is a copy of our index page. It is "noindex,follow" however as it has a few outside links (unasked for) it sometimes gets both PR and indexed.

This usually only lasts a short time. It appears that Googlebot temporarily indexes it until it redoes the whole site and then takes it out again. We don't want them indexing it because of duplicate content.

[Chris_D]

Kaled, doesn't post 4 indicate that the issue could be spacing/ syntax related? And post 1 was "no index,no follow" - again spacing/ syntax?

Bekyed - Can you check the cached copy to see the actual meta & let us know please?

[kaled]

"NO INDEX" can only be treated as "NOINDEX" if, say, non-alpanumeric chars are stripped.

If I were writing the code, I would simply look for the occurrence of keywords. This would accept published standards and also accept some variations. I would not expect "NO INDEX" to work.

Kaled.