Websites removed from Google index - possibly because of noindex tag

[Fergus_Macdonald]

This post is deleted!

[TomRayner]

Hi Fergus

I'm detecting a name="robots" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"/> on both the http and https versions of your site.  On the http version it is in line 592 (when viewing the homepage's source) and within the of the code.  Now, usually, from what I have seen and experienced Google and Bing do not tend to follow meta robot instructions placed in the body of the code.  However, I would not leave this to chance at all and would advise you remove that bit of code from the http version of the site ASAP.

Getting the sites reindexed and reappearing can take in excess of a week or two weeks.  You can try to speed up the process by sharing the URLs on social media sites, particularly Google+ which can serve as a rapid URL indexer.  You might want to try that (tie it in with a promotion or message about your site).

Going forward, once the https site is all set up, you will want to 301 redirect the http equivalent to the https in order to avoid any potential duplicate content problems and to pass on the strength of your existing links to the site.

In the meantime, I'd look to get that line of code removed ASAP and see if that has any effect on getting the site reindexed, which you can hopefully speed up by sharing your URL(s) on Google+.

Hope this helps.

[Fergus_Macdonald]

This post is deleted!

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Tom,

Wow! Amazed that's in there. Thank you for pointing that out.

Looks like it's part of the code for our site reviews widget. I hadn't even thought to look for something there, as assumed that SPDY was the issue.

We're actually in the process of contemplating switching from http to https so now may be a good time to do it!