Does Google not understand noindex,nofollow?

**philhancox** · 03-07-08

I specifically set The Retail Factory Affiliate Area as noindex,nofollow (see meta tag in header), and as it's a WordPress blog, you can set it to 'private' so that it doesn't communicate with Google.
But lo and behold, it appears on a search for "The Retail Factory" (page 2).

What else are you supposed to do to keep it out of the index? Do I need to robots.txt it out despite the meta tag?

**tbp** · 03-07-08

It may be Wordpress is tinkering with the headers for some reason, so the noindex tag is getting removed.

Whatever the cause is, I would use a robots.txt file anyway to block it.

**Travel Pixel** · 03-07-08

block in robots.txt and if you want to be really hardcore block the bot in .htacess (assuming you are running a linux server)

Dave:tup

**MrCatz** · 10-07-08

Originally Posted by tbp

It may be Wordpress is tinkering with the headers for some reason, so the noindex tag is getting removed.

Whatever the cause is, I would use a robots.txt file anyway to block it.

This would resolve your problem to prevent the SE bots from crawling your pages. Try this out and let us know if it worked for you...