Does Implemented SEO Changes Using Google Tag Manager are not supported any more?

[GeorgeGia]

Hello all!

On May i read the article https://moz.com/blog/seo-changes-using-google-tag-manager and I implemented it in order to de-index some pages.

I was really happy cause it worked but now the same problem appeared. Does anybody know if Google stopped taking into consideration SEO changes through Tag Manager?

Hin6E Hin6E

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Why do you think that? It probably really depends on the changes that you've made. In general I would never recommend making SEO changes through GTM anyway as it's not a best practice and you're depending on them being able to load the changes the right way.

Martijn.

[ThompsonPaul]

Google only pays attention to the rendered page, they don't care (or even know about) what technology was used to create the page. So no, they wouldn't have suddenly started ignoring optimisations made through Tag Manage. (As long as Tag Manager is still working properly on your site, of course)

If you used ineffective methods of no-indexing, it's possible for pages to return to the index. (For example, robots.txt does not no-index pages, and blocking no-indexed pages in robots.txt can cause them to later be reindexed in other ways.)

Paul

[GeorgeGia]

Actually, i used it to add no index tag on some pages. This tag removed any existing meta robots tag, and wrote a "noindex follow" meta robots tag.

I've checked tag manager and is working perfectly so, for safety reasons, I  will return to classic method of de-indexing pages

Thank You

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Good! Are you still sure this applies to all pages that are going to be rendered (with the help of GTM)?

[ThompsonPaul]

George, you also need to confirm that those pages you want no-indexed are not blocked in the robots.txt file at the base of your website. As mentioned above, if they're under a robots.txt block, the crawler won't see your on-page no-index tag and the pages can still end up in the index.

Also, you can right-click on an empty spot on the page and select Inspect to see the rendered version of the code in the Inspector. If that shows your no-index correctly and the page isn't blocked by robots.txt, the issue isn't GTM.

[GeorgeGia]

Thank you Paul