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Follow-rule conflict

directives.conflicting_follow_directives
Priority
Medium
Severity
Warning

What we look for

These pages give robots rules (instructions for search engines) in both a meta tag and an X-Robots-Tag header, and together the two say both follow and nofollow (do not follow this page's links).

Why it matters

Search engines usually obey the stricter rule, so they may not follow the links on these pages, and the pages those links lead to can be found late or not at all.

How to fix

Make the robots meta tag in the page template and the X-Robots-Tag header in the server settings agree. Remove nofollow from both if search engines should follow the page's links, or keep it in both if they should not.

Where you’ll see it

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal
When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: directives.conflicting_follow_directives
crawl.json and the CSV
The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "directives.conflicting_follow_directives"
The HTML report
This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=directives.conflicting_follow_directives
MCP
raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings {
  "job_id": "...",
  "check_id": "directives.conflicting_follow_directives"
}