• About
  • Write For Us
  • Contact
  • Top 50 Photography Blogs
  • Resources
  • Forum

IndustryDev

  • Design
    • Photoshop
    • Lightroom
    • Camera Raw
    • Bridge
  • Development
    • HTML
    • CSS
    • Javascript
    • PHP
    • Dev Tools
    • WordPress
  • Photography
  • Blogging
  • Technology
  • Inspiration
You are here: Home / Technology / Tons of Noindexed “What’s New” Pages in XenForo Software

Tons of Noindexed “What’s New” Pages in XenForo Software

August 8, 2019

I think I have unearthed another piece of the SEO puzzle in XenForo forum software. I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and I clicked into the Coverage area. I clicked the Excluded tab up top and then I clicked the Excluded by Noindex Tag link in the description below. I noticed that my site had thousands of “What’s New” pages that had been crawled, but since they contained the noindex tag, they weren’t put into Google’s index. Now, I’ll tell you from my over 20 years of experience working on the internet and in SEO that having all these noindex pages is not good. Just because they say noindex on them, they still accumulate and bleed pagerank all over the place. I’ve battled with this type of thing for ages.

It seems as though the ID for the page is the only thing that changes. I’m not sure if they’re based on sessions or what. All the pages are actually duplicates of one another. For instance, this is what two sample URLs would look like.

https://www.mysite.com/forum/whats-new/posts/20770/
https://www.mysite.com/forum/whats-new/posts/20771/

…and so on.

For a while, I’ve wondered where all these pages were coming from. Where they were linked to from. Then, I clicked on the small link the “Latest Posts” widget that I have on the homepage. Actually, I had this widget showing on almost all pages until a few days ago. Even though the link to the What’s New page has a nofollow attribute in it, Google is still following all these links that randomly change 24 hours a day, creating all these duplicate pages. By the way, I’m up over 17,000 of these pages in the Google Webmaster Console now. It’s getting out of hand.

I believe I have found a solution to this issue. Since the link on the homepage links to:

https://www.mysite.com/forum/whats-new/posts/?skip=1

and then redirects to one of those other styled URLs that I displayed above, all I did was block the /whats-new/ directory in the robots.txt file. I wouldn’t have done this if there were thousands of different links to all these various pages, but since the source is just through one link, I think this is okay. It’ll take months for Google to see that these are now blocked and to drop the reference to them from their index, but I think things will be okay after that. This directory is even blocked on the XenForo site itself.

Have you noticed something like this happening on your site? Please let me know. What did you do about it?

Related posts:

  1. SEO For XenForo Forum Software
  2. Noindex Tag is Bad For Website SEO
  3. How To Make Custom Page Titles For XenForo Discussion Forum Software
  4. Does XenForo Offer Post & Thread Statistics?
  5. SEO For Discussion Forums Regarding Google Panda

Filed Under: Technology

What’s Next? Email Updates!

If you enjoyed reading this post, why not consider signing up to receive others like it by email? It's so easy and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Connect With Me

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

MOST POPULAR POSTS

  • How to Set the Photo Quality in your Canon Rebel DSLR Camera Before participating in any type of photo shoot, it's i...
  • How to Adjust the Mouse Click & Scroll Settings in Windows 10 I's say this is one of the very first settings I ed...
  • How to Export Video From Adobe Photoshop When it comes to exporting and rendering video clips, t...
  • How to Apply an Adjustment to Only One Layer in Adobe Photoshop The answer is clipping. I'll tell you that right up fro...
  • How to Speed Up & Slow Down Video in Adobe Photoshop This is one of those posts that's going to be super hel...
  • Cutting Out a Shape From a Shape in Adobe Photoshop I've been using shapes for various things in Adobe Phot...
  • How to Set the Self Timer On Your Canon Rebel DSLR Camera Camera self timers are great. I was recently part of a...
  • Animating Scale, Rotation & Opacity in Adobe Photoshop I sat down a few days ago and started messing around in...
  • 3 Ways to Close Applications in Windows 10 This is going to be a very quick post because the topic...
  • How to Set Your Canon Rebel Camera For Continuous Shooting Continuous Shooting mode is very important for those wh...

Recent Comments

  • Jay Gaulard on Is Geodesic Solutions Out of Business?
  • Bajasid on Is Geodesic Solutions Out of Business?
  • Jay Gaulard on Is Geodesic Solutions Out of Business?
  • Bajasid on Is Geodesic Solutions Out of Business?
  • angelica blanco on How to Organize Video & Audio Project Files for Adobe Photoshop

Copyright © 2021 · IndustryDev.com Web Design & Photography Blog · About · Write For Us · Contact · Privacy / Terms · Sitemap