'noindex' in 'robots' meta tag

ldor
5 years, 11 months ago
Hi,
I've just discovered that after I updated Mobile Joomla to v2 all mobile pages have 'noindex, nofollow' in robots meta tag. What is even worse is that, although 'noindex' directive appears only in mobile pages (those with subdomain m.) Google somehow applies it also to regular www. pages. That's why my site has lost ALL Google indexing. Only those pages that were not crawled after the update are still indexed (of course only until Google crawls them). Why is it so and what is the way to correct this?
dryabov
5 years, 11 months ago
Most likely it is related to switching to mobile-first index in Google. I'll try to release update to MJ as soon as possible. Ideally, there should be canonical tag for search engines that support it, and noindex for other search engines. But the problem is that it is unknown how other search engines interpret canonical tag (as far as I remember, Bing uses it as a hint only, and noindex seems to be preferable).
ldor
5 years, 11 months ago
Well, meanwhile I've found and fixed the problem. It was in one of mobilejoomla.php files which has a meta tag 'noindex, nofollow'. Interestigly that meta tag was also affecting desktop www pages, not only m pages (initially I wrongly thought that www pages were not affected). When I corrected that meta tag to 'index, follow', everything got all right - now I see 'index, follow' tag in HTML code of all pages, both mobile and desktop.
I don't know how this mistake took place but it costed me a loss of all visitors for more than a month. Somehow only today I discovered the issue in Webmaster Tools and thus was able to find what was wrong. And as it is hard written in the php file, it must be affecting all sites using Mobile Joomla, not just my site. Don't know, maybe the paid version does not have this issue but the free version does
dryabov
5 years, 11 months ago
Could you send me example URL of desktop page where you found noindex meta-tag? In theory, it should happen for URLs with ?device=mobile query suffix only. I'm trying to simulate different cases now, and any extra data would be very useful.
ldor
5 years, 11 months ago
It's not a specific URL - all URLs on my site were affected, including the Home Page

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