Blocked By Meta Robots

[wayne1]

Hi

I logged in the other day to find that over night I received 8347 notices saying certain pages are being kept out of the search engine indexes by meta-robots.

I have not changed my robots.txt in years and I certainly didn't block Google from visiting those pages.

Is this a fault on Roger Mozbot behalf? Or is there a bot preventing 8000+ pages being indexed?

Is there a way to find out what meta-robot is doing this and where? And how I can get rid of it?

I usually rank between #3 and #5 for the term 'sex toys' on google.com.au, but I now rank #7 to #9 so it would seem some of my pages/content is being blocked.

My website is www.theloveshop.com THIS IS AN ADULT TOYS SITE.

There is no porn videos or anything like that on it, but just in case you don't wish to look at sex toys or are around kids I thought I would mention it.

Blake

[NakulGoyal]

The meta robots block sounds like it's a block from your CMS or something in your header include file or something. I would check on the pages that show as blocked to see if there's any noindex sort of code in those pages. Other then that, shift in rankings could be based on your competition optimizing for the same set of keywords. I would recommend to spend some time analyzing the backlinks of the competition and see if you can gain some of those kinds of links.

On a side note: It also looks like you own both the .com and the .com.au site. The .com is hosted in AU and the .com.au is hosted in USA. Did you intend to do it the other way around ? I would imagine your rankings for the .com.au get better if it was hosted in Australia instead of USA.

[wayne1]

Hi Nakul

Thank you very much for the suggestions and I will start checking  the code on those pages today. Thanks for heads up on the .com.au site as well I will be changing the hosting today to Aus, and thanks to you that site may get pushed up the rankings for a highly competitive term that I have been fighting to get for years

As for following my competitors links, I have been doing that for awhile and it would seem most of them either buy their links or have them on pages that are irrelevant to our niche, one of my competitors has even acquired more links than SEOmoz.com but has no were near the content. In saying that I am by no means a pure white hat SEO, more of a grey hat if such a thing exists, simply because I find it hard to get links to an adult site without it being spammy of some sorts. So I have started writing articles and linking to products mentioned, but trying to make the articles interesting/funny at the same time. Hopefully soon I will start to see some improvement.

Again thank you for your help and I will let you know how I go with those pages blocked by bots.

Blake