Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
-
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages).
Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
-
Me too. It was that video that helped to clear things up for me. Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag. It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.
-
Good stuff. I was always under the impression they still crawled them (otherwise, how would you know if the block was removed).
-
Take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
to see what I am talking about.
Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.
-
Robots.txt prevents indexation, not crawling. The good news is that Googlebot stops crawling 404s.
-
Just a couple of under the hood things to check.
-
Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.
-
This may be a timing issue. Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?
If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue. If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it found.
-
I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association. In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page. You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.
-
If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do. Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it"
Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors. Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index. It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Does creating too many parent pages damage my website's SEO?
I need to know how to keep my website structure well organised and ensure Google still recognises the key pages. I work for a travel company which needs to give customers various pieces of information on our website and this needs to be well organised in terms of structure. For example, customers need information on airport pick-ups and drop-offs for each of our destinations but this isn't something that needs to rank on Google. Logically for site structure would be to create a parent page: thedragontrip.com/transfers/india Is creating parent pages for unimportant content a bad idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicolewretham1 -
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
Our Robots.txt and Reconsideration Request Journey and Success
We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others! A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed. At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools. Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries. From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited. A few weeks passed and things did not normalize. We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week. At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked. This did not change. Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked. We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize. Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked. We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request. This seemed to be our only hope. So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue. A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem. Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use. Major backfire. We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us. To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore. They did.... So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com. We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text. We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs. To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away! Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all. Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog. Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT. Then we waited... A few days later, we already had a response. DENIED. In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links. When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link. It was an interesting example. We actually already had this blog in removem. The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com. So, we went back to the drawing board. This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem. That added a few more links. We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links. We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress. We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials. We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest. A few days later, we had a message in WMT. DENIED AGAIN! This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove. The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google. Only a message in WMT. So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was. Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED! This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well. So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google. Our robots.txt issue. We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for. We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it. So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue. The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again. The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000! Success! We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero. So, some thoughts: 1. Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT? Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time? If the latter is the case then... 2. Did our reconsideration request backfire? Or, was it ultimately for the best? 3. When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known? If you want example links, ask for them. It never hurts to ask! If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be! 4. If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it. I wouldn't over do this or spam them. Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask. Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions. Thanks for reading! TheCraig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCraig5 -
Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file
I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it? So something like /_Q1. Will that pickup and block every URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1. So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo1234560 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0