Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to block "print" pages from indexing
-
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search.
Can you recommend a way to block this from happening?
Example Article:
Example "Print" page:
http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
-
Donnie, I agree. However, we had the same problem on a website and here's what we did the canonical tag:
Over a period of 3-4 weeks, all those print pages disappeared from the SERP. Now if I take a print URL and do a cache: for that page, it shows me the web version of that page.
So yes, I agree the question was about blocking the pages from getting indexed. There's no real recipe here, it's about getting the right solution. Before canonical tag, robots.txt was the only solution. But now with canonical there (provided one has the time and resources available to implement it vs adding one line of text to robots.txt), you can technically 301 the pages and not have to stop/restrict the spiders from crawling them.
Absolutely no offence to your solution in any way. Both are indeed workable solutions. The best part is that your robots.txt solution takes 30 seconds to implement since you provided the actually disallow code :), so it's better.
-
Thanks Jennifer, will do! So much good information.
-
Sorry, but I have to jump in - do NOT use all of those signals simultaneously. You'll make a mess, and they'll interfere with each other. You can try Robots.txt or NOINDEX on the page level - my experience suggests NOINDEX is much more effective.
Also, do not nofollow the links yet - you'll block the crawl, and then the page-level cues (like NOINDEX) won't work. You can nofollow later. This is a common mistake and it will keep your fixes from working.
-
Josh, please read my and Dr. Pete's comments below. Don't nofollow the links, but do use the meta noindex,follow on the page.
-
Rel-canonical, in practice, does essentially de-index the non-canonical version. Technically, it's not a de-indexation method, but it works that way.
-
You are right Donnie. I've "good answered" you too.
I've gone ahead and updated my robots.txt file. As soon as I am able, I will use no indexon the page, no follow on the links, and rel=canonical.
This is just what I needed, a quick fix until I can make a more permanent solution.
-
Your welcome : )
-
Although you are correct... there is still more then one way to skin a chicken.
-
But the spiders still run on the page and read the canonical link, however with the robot text the spiders will not.
-
Yes, but Rel=Canonical does not block a page it only tells google which page to follow out of two pages.The question was how to block, not how to tell google which link to follow. I believe you gave credit to the wrong answer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
This is not fair. lol
-
I have to agree with Jen - Robots.txt isn't great for getting indexed pages out. It's good for prevention, but tends to be unreliable as a cure. META NOINDEX is probably more reliable.
One trick - DON'T nofollow the print links, at least not yet. You need Google to crawl and read the NOINDEX tags. Once the ?print pages are de-indexed, you could nofollow the links, too.
-
Yes, it's strongly recommended. It should be fairly simple to populate this tag with the "full" URL of the article based on the article ID. This approach will not only help you get rid of the duplicate content issue, but a canonical tag essentially works like a 301 redirect. So from all search engine perspective you are 301'ing your print pages to the real web urls without redirecting the actual user's who are browsing the print pages if they need to.
-
Ya it is actually really useful. Unfortunately they are out of business now - so I'm hacking it on my own.
I will take your advice. I've shamefully never used rel= canonical before - so now is a good time to start.
-
True but using robots.txt does not keep them out of the index. Only using "noindex" will do that.
-
Thanks Donnie. Much appreciated!
-
I actually remember Lore from a while ago. It's an interesting, easy to use FAQ CMS.
Anyways, I would also recommend implementing Canonical Tags for any possible duplicate content issues. So whether it's the print or the web version, each one of them will contain a canonical tag pointing to the web url of that article in the section of your website.
rel="canonical" href="http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html" /> -
-
Try This.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*&action=print
-
Theres more then one way to skin a chicken.
-
Rather than using robots.txt I'd use a noindex,follow tag instead to the page. This code goes into the tag for each print page. And it will ensure that the pages don't get indexed but that the links are followed.
-
That would be great. Do you mind giving me an example?
-
you can block in .robot text, every page that ends in action=print
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
-
Page with "random" content
Hi, I'm creating a page of 300+ in the near future, on which the content basicly will be unique as it can be. However, upon every refresh, also coming from a search engine refferer, i want the actual content such as listing 12 business to be displayed random upon every hit. So basicly we got 300+ nearby pages with unique content, and the overview of those "listings" as i might say, are being displayed randomly. Ive build an extensive script and i disabled any caching for PHP files in specific these pages, it works. But what about google? The content of the pages will still be as it is, it is more of the listings that are shuffled randomly to give every business listing a fair shot at a click and so on. Anyone experience with this? Ive tried a few things in the past, like a "Last update PHP Month" in the title which sometimes is'nt picked up very well.
Technical SEO | | Vanderlindemedia0 -
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreatMaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0 -
Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google
Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member
Technical SEO | | fugu0