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.
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
-
Hi!
I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us.
The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx
I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /community/photos/
Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible?
Thanks!
Leona
-
Are you seeing the images getting indexed, though? Even if GWT recognize the Robots.txt directives, blocking the pages may essentially keep the images from having any ranking value. Like Matt, I'm not sure this will work in practice.
Another option would be to create an alternate path to just the images, like an HTML sitemap with just links to those images and decent anchor text. The ranking power still wouldn't be great (you'd have a lot of links on this page, most likely), but it would at least kick the crawlers a bit.
-
Thanks Matt for your time and assistance! Leona
-
Hi Leona - what you have done is something along the lines of what I thought would work for you - sorry if I wasn't clear in my original response - I thought you meant if you created a robots.txt and specified Googlebot to be disallowed then Googlebot-image would pick up the photos still and as I said this wouldn't be the case as it Googlebot-image will follow what it set out for Googlebot unless you specify otherwise using the allow directive as I mentioned. Glad it has worked for you - keep us posted on your results.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your feedback!
It is not my belief that Googlebot overwrides googlebot-images otherwise specifying something for a specific bot of Google's wouldn't work, correct?
I setup the following:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /community/photos/
User-agent: googlebot-Image
Allow: /community/photos/
I tested the results in Google Webmaster Tools which indicated:
Googlebot: Blocked by line 26: Disallow: /community/photos/Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
Googlebot-Image: Allowed by line 29: Allow: /community/photos/Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
Thanks for your help!
Leona
-
Hi Leona
Googlebot-image and any of the other bots that Google uses follow the rules set out for Googlebot so blocking Googlebot would block your images as it overrides Googlebot-image. I don't think that there is a way around this using the disallow directive as you are blocking the directory which contains your images so they won't be indexed using specific images.
Something you may want to consider is the Allow directive -
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/~username~/
that is if Google is already indexing images under the username path?
The allow directive will only be successful if it contains more or equal number of characters as the disallow path, so bare in mind that if you had the following;
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/
the allow will win out and nothing will be blocked. please note that i haven't actioned the allow directive myself but looked into it in depth when i studied the robots.txt for my own sites it would be good if someone else had an experience of this directive. Hope this helps.
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
-
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Whats the best way to remove search indexed pages on magento?
A new client ( aqmp.com.br/ )call me yestarday and she told me since they moved on magento they droped down more than US$ 20.000 in sales revenue ( monthly)... I´ve just checked the webmaster tool and I´ve just discovered the number of crawled pages went from 3.260 to 75.000 since magento started... magento is creating lots of pages with queries like search and filters. Example: http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?mode=grid http://aqmp.com.br/acessorios/lencos.html?dir=desc&order=name Add a instruction on robots.txt is the best way to remove unnecessary pages of the search engine?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Google Said "Repeat the search with the omitted results included."
We have some pages targeting the different countries but with the Near to Similar content/products, just distinguished with the country name etc. one of the page was assigned to me for optimizing. two or three Similar pages are ranked with in top 50 for the main keyword. I updated some on page content to make it more distinguish from others. After some link building, I found that this page still not showing in Google result, even I found the following message on the google. "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 698 already displayed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I clicked to repeat omitted result and found that my targeted url on 450th place in google (before link building this was not) My questions are Is google consider this page low quality or duplicate content? Is there any role of internal linking to give importance a page on other (when they are near to similar)? Like these pages can hurt the whole site rankings? How to handle this issue?0