Temporarily suspend Googlebot without blocking users
-
We'll soon be launching a redesign, on a new platform, migrating millions of pages to new URLs.
How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site? We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture.
GWT's recommendation is to 503 all pages - including robots.txt, but that also makes the site invisible to real site visitors, resulting in significant business loss. Bad answer.
I've heard some recommendations to disallow all user agents in robots.txt. Any answer that puts the millions of pages we already have indexed at risk is also a bad answer.
Thanks
-
So it seems like we've gone full circle.
The initial question was, "How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site? We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture."
Sounds like the answer is, 'that's not possible'.
-
Putting a noindex/nofollow on an index url will remove it from SERPs, although some ulrs will still show for direct search (using the url itself as a KW) but even then they will appear as clear links without any TItle/Description details.
Using a 301 redirect will remove the old page from index, regardless of noindex/nofollow.
If you are using a noindex/nofollow for the new url - both will not show.
-
Thank you, Ruth!
Can I ask a clarifying question?
If I put a noindex/nofollow on the new urls, wouldn't the result be the same as if I put noindex/nofollow on the indexed urls? There is only one instance of each page - and all of the millions of indexed URLs will be redirecting to new urls.
Here is my assumption: if I put noindex/nofollow on the new urls - a search bot will crawl the old url, follow the redirect to the new url, detect the noindex/nofollow, and then drop the old, indexed url from their index. Is that the wrong assumption?
-
I would use robots.txt to noindex the whole website as well - but just the new pages, not the old ones. Then when you're ready to be crawled, remove the robots.txt entry and Fetch as Googlebot to get re-crawled. You may fall out of the index for a day or two but should quickly be re-indexed.
Another solution would be to use the meta robots tag to individually noindex each page (if there's a way to do that in your CMS, obviously adding them by hand wouldn't be scalable), and then remove. That may increase your chances of getting re-crawled and re-indexed sooner.
-
Thanks for the response, Mark.
It sounds as if you tried this on a few new pages.
I'm talking about millions of existing pages.
Would you robots.txt noindex your entire website? Seems like you'd run a huge risk of being dumped from the index entirely.
-
I recommend robots text noindex, nofollow.
That way people can still see the pages they just aren't indexed in Google yet.
As we developed some new pages on one of our sites we did this and we could still view pages and send folks there that we wanted to see the content for feedback - but no one else knew they were there.
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
-
Deleting Tags without Penalty?
Hello - We have a site with over 1,000 tags. We added too many and would like a fresh start as they are creating a lot of duplicate pages on the site. What is the best way to go about deleting all of these tags without being penalized by Google? Is there a way to tell Google direclty to stop crawling them? We would prefer to not have that many pages just sit as 404 errors on the site. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | FamiliesLoveTravel0 -
URL structure change for pages without traffic: 301 redirect or not ?
Hi, I am just starting with MOZ PRO and trying to handle the high priority issues, starting with pages with 4XX Client Error. I am wondering what we should do with pages with no traffic and no external links. For instance: So time ago we change the URL structure of our blog to a flatter one, and so eg we moved a page: from: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/poradniki-po-markach/vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza to: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/marka-vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza/ Still not very flat but this is not the point. MOZ PRO shows we are having internal links to the old url. According to MOZ PRO, we don't have external links. According to Analytics we have no traffic on the old page. So now we changed the internal link, and I am wondering whether we should 301 redirect the old page to the new one, or whether a sitemap update is enough for this kind of pages ? Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | isabelledylag0 -
Google webmaster… Zopim Live chat blocking the resources
I have noticed that Zopim Live chat blocking the resources (URL’s). What are the reasons? Now I have fetched blocked urls again for indexing purpose but still I want to know the reason. Any help from experts??? yYJJ8oM.jpg
Technical SEO | | udistm0 -
301 redirects without .htaccess
I have a client that recently moved from an old ZenCart e-commerce site to Volusion. The domain name did not change. We need to redirect a bunch of the old URLs; however, Volusion's redirect tool does not work for URLS with "?" . The old ZenCart structure is: http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=563 Volusion is a hosted platform and we do not have access to the .htaccess file. Any suggestions on a workaround? Thanks!Nancy <colgroup><col width="960"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NancyVPS
| |0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
While SEOMoz currently can tell us the number of linking c-blocks, can SEOMoz tell us what the specific c-blocks are?
I know it is important to have a diverse set of c-blocks, but I don't know how it is possible to have a diverse set if I can't find out what the c-blocks are in the first place. Also, is there a standard for domain linking c-blocks? For instance, I'm not sure if a certain amount is considered "average" or "above-average."
Technical SEO | | Todd_Kendrick0 -
301'ing googlebot
I have a client that has been 301’ing googlebot to the canonical page. This is because they have a cart_id and session parameters in urls. This is mainly from when googlebot comes in on a link that has these parameters in the URL, as they don’t serve these parameters up to googlebot at all once it starts to crawl the site.
Technical SEO | | AlanMosley
I am worried about cloaking; I wanted to know if anyone has any info on this.
I know that Google have said that doing anything where you detect goolgebots useragent and treat them different is a problem.
Anybody had any experience on this, I would be glad to hear.0 -
How do I check if my IP is blocked?
We changed servers and where our sites once ranked very highly (page 1 for all sites), they now are nowhere to be seen. Someone suggested that our IP might be blocked. Someone else suggested SEOMoz was the place to go to get it checked. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. With thanks. Bryan
Technical SEO | | FortressLearning0