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.
Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain
-
Hi,
My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days.
At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain:
The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com
and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com
Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow.
I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com)
but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow.
My question is:
Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet?Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again?
I hope I explained the problem good enough.
Looking forward for your valuable replies.
Thanks.
-
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your replies.
I decided to retrieve the old domain and do 302 redirect from the new domain to the old one.
I will let google index the old one completely once again and only then i will do 301.
Would love to hear what you think about that.
Thanks,
Eliran. -
Here's the concept at its core: how can Google crawl redirects and index new pages if it can't crawl those redirects to get to the new pages and process the 301s?
Fix that to fix your problem. The link I shared has a lot of good comments very centered on this general topic.
And, I am intentionally avoiding giving an absolute solution to you because, quite frankly, I don't know enough or am involved at all in your site to feel comfortable doing so. Strategically, I'm happy to share ideas/best practices.
-
Hi **Andrea,
Thanks for your reply. **I have no worries about google getting me back to my rankings, I am sure he will.
The main problem is as you quoted: "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied."
Are you suggesting that I need to put websitebuildersworld.com domain backup and let google re-crawl it and only then redirect it?
Thanks,
Eliran. -
The reason that comes up to my mind is that basically I didn't let google see WebsiteBuildersWorld.com without the noindex,nofollow removal fix so he wouldn't know what to redirect or something like that because the last time he visited websitebuilderworld.com he saw noindex,nofollow and now he can't visit it anymore because he is being redirected to websiteplanet.com
-
"maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?"
I'm not 100% certain, but I can't think of any reason you would need to do that.
-
Hi Adam,
Yes this is what I thought.
But I also had a weird thought that maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?As for a' and b' yes I will do that.
-
I think I get what you mean and this stuff can get a bit tricky - first and foremost, it can take days/weeks/months to get things unclogged after an issue like this and there's no promise you'll get exactly the same ranking as you had before.
Getting back to your original question, and not to kick you when you are down, however, Google never recommends moving an entire site at once because you don't catch major things like this. Now, to your question, here's answer: "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied." I think that's what you are trying to get at?
There's more info here that may be worth you reading through: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
-
I think I understand. Since your site was de-indexed, Google has to start over indexing your site on the new domain. This is what should happen:
Google will follow any external links it finds pointing to your site, will find the 301 redirect, and will follow that to your new site. Google will then crawl your new domain. Google will "forward" most of the link juice from your backlinks to your new domain.
Via your internal link structure, the forwarded PageRank will be spread throughout your site. This will hopefully result in you regaining the rankings you previously had.
I assume you have forwarded each subpage on the old domain to the same page on the new domain?
I would also:
a) if you can, change over at least some of your backlinks to point to your new domain
b) build/attract links to your new domain
-
The thing is that I didn't 'give' google the chance to index the website again with the old domain after I fixed the noindex,nofollow.
Quite hard to explain, but do you get what I mean?
-
Oh, OK. Then I would say: yes, you should regain your rankings, though it's possible it will take time. Some SEOs have reported it takes several months to regain their rankings after switching domains, but I personally have not had that issue.
-
Hi Adam,
Thanks for your reply, but it wasn't really my question I afraid.
The thing is that I wonder if google will index back all our results and put them back in their spots and just redirect to the new domain.
Thanks,
Eliran. -
Google is not going to index http://www.websitebuildersworld.com, because it redirects to http://www.websiteplanet.com. Google won't index a domain that redirects to another domain. It will index the domain where the content is hosted.
-
Hi,
Thanks for your reply, much appreciated.
Yes the sitemap is submitted in WMT, thd old domain sitemap and the new domain sitemap.
So in your opinion everything should be back to normal, correct?
and yes, very big stuff
, he uploaded the Header from the demo file with the noindex,nofollow... caused me to lose a lot of money and I around 80% of my pages including homepage got deleted from SERP's. -
Go into WMT if you have an account and resubi your sitemap for websitebuildersword.com, or simply google suggest site or something similar and find where you can submit your site to google again.
It should get indexed again anyway, because you should have some links out there somewhere that the bots will detect and go to your site from.
Quite a big stuff up though, on your programmers part.
Good luck

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
-
How Much Domain Age Matter In Ranking?
I am very confused about domain age. I read many articles about domain age, some experts say domain age does matter in ranking and some experts say it doesn't matter in the ranking. Kindly guide me about domain age.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Domain name suffix impact on SEO
Hello there, We are about to launch a new website and were wondering what impact a specific suffix would have from an SEO point of view. We were thinking about going for a domain which ends in .london as oppose to .com We are based in London and sell world wide via our website. We are suggesting www.domain.london as oppose to www.domain.com I would appreciate your views... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW
Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> Is the tag above the same as: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
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 | | bigtimeseo0