Hey there, fellow SEO-readers. Welcome to another week of SEO News. Prepare yourself for some exciting news this week. Let’s see what we have in store, shall we? 

• Ahref’s rank tracking issue 
• Twitter revert links back to NoFollow 
• Google’s John Mueller on the best method to stop crawling 

4/7 – Ahref’s rank tracking issue 

A Facebook user recently complained that Rank Tracking for Ahref has mingled local pack results with SERPs. This saw ranking reports for some local clients show inaccurate reports which results in ranking reports shooting up. 

In response to this post, Ahref’s Chief Marketing Officer Tim Suolo replied saying that this is not a change in Ahref’s way of tracking rank. This instead is a bug that will be fixed soon. 

5/7 – Google’s John Mueller on the best method to stop crawling 

Google’s John Mueller recently clarified in Google SEO office-hours on the difference between preventing crawls using robots.txt and robots meta tag. 

However, there are subtle differences between the two in that robots.txt outright prevents crawling while robots meta tag prevents indexing. 

The potential limitation with using robots.txt to prevent crawling would be that where there are a lot of references to the page, the URL could still appear in search results without any of its content as Google is unable to crawl the content. 

Whereas by using robots meta tag, Google will be able to crawl the page, see the noindex meta tag and drop the content completely from Google Search.

Twitter revert links back to NoFollow 

A few weeks back, I mentioned that Google has removed the NoFollow attributes from links originating from Twitter. 

However, it seems Twitter has reinstated nofollow attributes back to links. 

The End

That is it for this week’s news fellow readers. What do you think? Are you an Ahref subscriber? Do you use robots.txt or robots meta tag to prevent pages from appearing in Google Search? Leave your comments below. 

Updated: 25 April 2024

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