Robots.txt Question
-
In the past, I had blocked a section of my site (i.e. domain.com/store/) by placing the following in my robots.txt file: "Disallow: /store/" Now, I would like the store to be indexed and included in the search results. I have removed the "Disallow: /store/" from the robots.txt file, but approximately one week later a Google search for the URL produces the following meta description in the search results: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more"
Is there anything else I need to do to speed up the process of getting this section of the site indexed?
-
Thanks for the "Good Answer" flag, David! I reformatted & added a little extra info to make the process a little clearer.
Paul
-
To help speed up the process of getting re-included, use the "Fetch as Googlebot" and "Fetch as Bingbot" tools in Webmaster Tools for a page in the blocked section - this significantly helps jumpstart indexing of pages.Once you see a successful Fetch status, click Submit to Index, and then specify to submit URL and all linked pages.
In addition
- make certain your new pages are listed in your sitmap.xml file, and then resubmit the sitemap to the search engines using Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
- make sure your own internal pages (especially a few strong ones) link to the newly unblocked content
- see if you can get a couple good new incoming links to some of the pages in the new section - even if they're no-follow, they can help guide the crawlers to the newly available pages
Essentially you're trying to give the SEs as many hints as possible that there are new pages to crawl and hopefully index.
Paul
[edited for additional clarity]
-
Thanks. I figured this was the case, but was not sure if I was missing any "best practices" about getting the previously blocked URL included faster.
-
David, If I am correct this is an old message sitting in the index. Give it another week or so and I am sure this message will vanish. I had this with one of my sites that I went live with but forget to allow in the robots.txt file.
shivun
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
-
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
Question about keywords on multiple pages
Hello all great to be apart of this community, My question is: I am trying to rank for two separate "two keyword" searches which are "BBB boost" and "ZZZ boost" I am planning to put "ZZZ boost" on my homepage/landing, and "BBB boost" on my second page where the end user actually purchases said product. "ZZZ boost" - receives around 22,000 monthly searches and "BBB boost" - around 5000 monthly searches Because each of these share the one keyword "boost" in them, will it affect my ability to rank for even one page on the "two keyword" phrase? Or will it cause both pages to come up in the google search results on either "two keyword" phrase because they share the same word "boost" in them? If so does that affect the ability to rank 1 page since they share the same domain name, will it divide page ranking/serp ranking?
Technical SEO | | zerk890 -
Robots.txt | any SEO advantage to having one vs not having one?
Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it. Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Robots.txt crawling URL's we dont want it to
Hello We run a number of websites and underneath them we have testing websites (sub-domains), on those sites we have robots.txt disallowing everything. When I logged into MOZ this morning I could see the MOZ spider had crawled our test sites even though we have said not to. Does anyone have an ideas how we can stop this happening?
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Google (GWT) says my homepage and posts are blocked by Robots.txt
I guys.. I have a very annoying issue.. My Wordpress-blog over at www.Trovatten.com has some indexation-problems.. Google Webmaster Tools data:
Technical SEO | | FrederikTrovatten22
GWT says the following: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt." and shows me my homepage and my blogposts.. This is my Robots.txt: http://www.trovatten.com/robots.txt
"User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ Do you have any idea why it says that the URL's are being blocked by robots.txt when that looks how it should?
I've read a couple of places that it can be because of a Wordpress Plugin that is creating a virtuel robots.txt, but I can't validate it.. 1. I have set WP-Privacy to crawl my site
2. I have deactivated all WP-plugins and I still get same GWT-Warnings. Looking forward to hear if you have an idea that might work!0 -
Domain Crawl Question
We have our domain hosted by two providers - web.com for the root and godaddy for the subdomain. Why SEOMOZ is not picking up the total pages of the entire domain?
Technical SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
Parameter Handling - Nourls Question
We're trying to make sense of Google's new parameter handling options and I seem unable to find a good answer to an issue regarding the NoUrl option. For ex. we have two Urls pointing to the same content: http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=1&x=0.518&y=0.3965 http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=2&x=0.518&y=0.3965 Ideally, I would want Google to index only the main Url without any parameters, so http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map To do this, I would set the value No Urls for the zoom, x and y parameters. By doing this do we still get any SEO value from back links that point to the URLs with the parameters, or will Google just ignore them?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0 -
Complex duplicate content question
We run a network of three local web sites covering three places in close proximity. Each sitehas a lot of unique content (mainly news) but there is a business directory that is shared across all three sites. My plan is that the search engines only index the business in the directory that are actually located in the place the each site is focused on. i.e. Listing pages for business in Alderley Edge are only indexed on alderleyedge.com and businesses in Prestbury only get indexed on prestbury.com - but all business have a listing page on each site. What would be the most effective way to do this? I have been using rel canonical but Google does not always seem to honour this. Will using meta noindex tags where appropriate be the way to go? or would be changing the urls structure to have the place name in and using robots.txt be a better option. As an aside my current url structure is along the lines of: http://dev.alderleyedge.com/directory/listing/138/the-grill-on-the-edge Would changing this have any SEO benefit? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mreeves0