Restricted by robots.txt does this cause problems?
-
I have restricted around 1,500 links which are links to retailers website and links that affiliate links accorsing to webmaster tools
Is this the right approach as I thought it would affect the link juice? or should I take the no follow out of the restricted by robots.txt file
-
Hello Ocelot,
I am assuming you have a site that has affiliate links and you want to keep Google from crawling those affiliate links. If I am wrong, please let me know. Going forward with that assumption then...
That is one way to do it. So perhaps you first send all of those links through a redirect via a folder called /out/ or /links/ or whatever, and you have blocked that folder in the robots.txt file. Correct? If so, this is how many affiliate sites handle the situation.
I would not rely on rel nofollow alone, though I would use that in addition to the robots.txt block.
There are many other ways to handle this. For instance, you could make all affilaite links javascript links instead of href links. Then you could put the javascript into a folder called /js/ or something like that, and block that in the robots.txt file. This works less and less now that Google Preview Bot seems to be ignoring the disallow statement in those situations.
You could make it all the same URL with a unique identifyer of some sort that tells your database where to redirect the click. For example:
www.yoursite.com/outlink/mylink#123
or
www.yoursite.com/mylink?link-id=123
In which case you could then block /mylink in the robots.txt file and tell Google to ignore the link-ID parameter via Webmaster Tools.
As you can see, there is more than one way to skin this cat. The problem is always going to be doing it without looking like you're trying to "fool" Google - because they WILL catch up with any tactic like that eventually.
Good luck!
Everett
-
From a coding perspective, applying the nofollow to the links is the best way to go.
With the robots.txt file, only the top tier search engines respect the information contained within, so lesser known bots or spammers might check your robots.txt file to see what you don't want listed, and that info will give them a starting point to look deeper into your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I identify technical problems with my website?
I am hoping for your good health. I would appreciate any tips on fixing technical issues on my website. Could anyone please help me to resolve some technical issues on my website? Thanks in advance. Here is my website: Apkarc
Technical SEO | | jjbndjkui880 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
Robots.txt and Magento
HI, I am working on getting my robots.txt up and running and I'm having lots of problems with the robots.txt my developers generated. www.plasticplace.com/robots.txt I ran the robots.txt through a syntax checking tool (http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html) This is what the tool came back with: http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/cgi/sxw/parserobots.pl?site=plasticplace.com There seems to be many errors on the file. Additionally, I looked at our robots.txt in the WMT and they said the crawl was postponed because the robots.txt is inaccessible. What does that mean? A few questions: 1. Is there a need for all the lines of code that have the “#” before it? I don’t think it’s necessary but correct me if I'm wrong. 2. Furthermore, why are we blocking so many things on our website? The robots can’t get past anything that requires a password to access anyhow but again correct me if I'm wrong. 3. Is there a reason Why can't it just look like this: User-agent: * Disallow: /onepagecheckout/ Disallow: /checkout/cart/ I do understand that Magento has certain folders that you don't want crawled, but is this necessary and why are there so many errors?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Roger has detected a problem:
_ Roger has detected a problem:_ We have detected that the root domain livefit.co.uk does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. Can anyone see why? Cheers Stephen
Technical SEO | | firstconversion0 -
Multiple redirects a problem?
When product is sold out I will 301 redirect to a category page if a similar product is not available, but now our web developer has changed all the url's of the category pages so I need to redirect them all to the new category pages but that means there are some products that are first being redirected to the no longer existent category and then being redirected again to the new category page. This seems like it might me be a problem having two 301 redirects so I wanted to find out for sure if it is. Unfortunately our system for redirecting pages is archaic so it will be difficult and time consuming to go back and redo all the redirects that are going to pages that no longer exist so I wanted to get some additional opinions before I do that.
Technical SEO | | KentH0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0 -
My home page 301 redirects - is this an SEO problem
When ever a browser calls my site canineconcepts.co.uk, it is automatically 301 redirected to canineconcepts.co.uk/en I am not sure if I should be concerned about this from an SEO perspective or not. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | CanineConcepts0