Google is reportedly engaged on fixing a bug with not having the ability to correctly reply to a noindex directive on some JavaScript generated pages. That is taking place for some React apps utilizing Single Web page Purposes (SPAs) which have the noindex directive on them however Google is just not selecting it up and thus indexing pages that shouldn’t be listed.
This difficulty was noticed by Mark Williams-Prepare dinner, the Director at Candour and Founding father of AlsoAsked, a well-liked search engine optimization instrument. He posted in regards to the difficulty on LinkedIn and stated, “This is a screenshot of over 9,000 “noindex” pages being listed. Including ‘noindex’ through JS could be a answer, however it’s completely not dependable.”
Right here is that screenshot from Google Search Console’s indexing report:
He later shared that Google is now conscious of the problem and is engaged on fixing it. “I spoke to Googlers about this and it’s a bug they’re engaged on fixing,” he wrote.
Mark went on to elucidate that that is an instance of a React app that has a meta “noindex” added through JavaScript, however the pages are nonetheless getting listed.
Martin Splitt from Google did converse prior to now about noindex meta and JavaScript pages and typically, Google does have a tough to processing them. However nowadays, Google should not be challenged by them. I assume on this case, Google was?
Once more, I believe on this case, Google fetched and rendered the web page previous to the JavaScript executing the noindex meta knowledge. So Googlebot did not see the noindex directive but. This may occur, it’s uncommon, however this could occur and clearly did occur. Google has warned about this earlier than, together with utilizing JavaScript to generate structured data in some circumstances.
Mark’s answer was to make use of CloudFlare to serve the noindex directive previous to the JavaScript executing its personal meta knowledge (which is served within the HTTP header), however that was solely after he came upon Google was not selecting up on the primary answer he had. Mark wrote, “With some Single Web page Purposes (SPAs), it may be tough to have management over what’s proven earlier than the JS is executed. On this occasion, I managed to get the pages to set a “noindex” earlier than JS was rendered by utilizing Cloudflare Remodel guidelines.”
So in the event you seen this difficulty as nicely, hopefully Google will patch it up and if not, search for an alternate answer – like Mark did.
Discussion board dialogue at LinkedIn.
