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MATT CUTTS: Today's question comes from Alex in Montreal.
Alex asks, hi Matt, I've been having issues with the no
index attribute.
In some instances I placed the attribute to block a page but
it still seems to get indexed.
Even when the page is cached with the no index attribute,
the page is not disappear.
Thoughts?
Great question, Alex.
I answered another webmaster video question with a somewhat
similar answer, which is if you see something like this,
that seems like it's a clear bug in our robots.txt
text or our noindex handling, or we're treating a web pages
as if it's a video, or something where you can grab a
screen shot or point to a particular link an so and show
this is really a bug, that's a perfect time to show up in our
Google webmaster forum.
Which is linked to from google.com/webmasters.
Now with your particular question, I've actually seen
one thing like this happen before.
You used the word no index twice in your question.
And you put a space in both times.
And I think noindex should have no space in it.
So I've seen at least one person in the past who they
actually had some spam.
And I pointed it out to them.
And they said, oh no, how did you know about that?
I was supposed to use the noindex so you could
never see that spam.
And I said, well you forgot and you put a space in the
noindex tag.
So it could be that that's what's causing the problem.
If it's not, no matter what, if you see something that
looks like a clear, clear bug, that's a great
time to show up.
Leave a question the webmaster forum.
And then sometimes people can instantly point out, oh maybe
you misspelled noindex, or added a space in, or here's
the strange thing.
But either way, that's a great way to help diagnose and debug
those sorts of situations.