Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow

    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.

    Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow

    Technical SEO
    4
    12
    3176
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • TalkInThePark
      TalkInThePark last edited by

      Hi Mozzers!

      We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter.

      We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming.

      But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems.

      What could be the reason?

      Best regards,

      Martin

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Cyrus-Shepard
        Cyrus-Shepard @TalkInThePark last edited by

        Sorry for the late reply. Feel free to send me a PM. (not sure I can help, but more than happy to take a look)

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • TalkInThePark
          TalkInThePark @TalkInThePark last edited by

          We do not currently have any sanitation rules in order to maintain the nocrawl param. But that is a good point. 301:ing will be difficult for us but I will definitely add the nocrawl param to the rel canonical of those internal SERPs.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • TalkInThePark
            TalkInThePark @Igal_Zeifman last edited by

            Thank you, Igol. I will definitely look into your first suggestion.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • TalkInThePark
              TalkInThePark @Cyrus-Shepard last edited by

              Thank you, Cyrus.

              This is what it looks like:

              User-agent: *
              Disallow: /nocrawl=1

              The weird thing is that when testing one of the sample URLs (given by Google as "problematic" in the GWMT message and that contains the nocrawl param) on the GWMT "Blocked URLs" page by entering the contents of our robots.txt and the sample URL, Google says crawling of the URL is disallowed for Googlebot.

              On the top of the same page, it says "Never" under the heading "Fetched when" (translated from Swedish..). But when i "Fetch as Google" our robots.txt, Googlebot has no problems fetching it. So i guess the "Never" information is due to a GWMT bug?

              I also tested our robots.txt against your recommended service http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check. It says all robots has access to the sample URL above, but I gather the tool is not wildcard-savvy.

              I will not disclose our domain in this context, please tell me if it is ok to send you a PW.

              About the noindex stuff. Basically, the nocrawl param is added to internal links pointing to internal search result pages filtered by more than two params. Although we allow crawling of less complicated internal serps, we disallow indexing of most of them by "meta noindex".

              Cyrus-Shepard 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Igal_Zeifman
                Igal_Zeifman @Cyrus-Shepard last edited by

                Thanks.

                100% agree with the Meta Noindex suggestion.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Cyrus-Shepard
                  Cyrus-Shepard last edited by

                  It can be tricky blocking parameters with robots.txt. The first thing you want to do is make sure your are actually blocking the URLs. There are a few good robots.txt checkers out there that can help:

                  • http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
                  • http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

                  You're file is probably going to look something like:

                  User-agent: *
                  Disallow: /*?nocrawl=1

                  ... but this could vary depending on exactly you don't want crawled

                  +1 to Igal's suggestion of handling these via parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

                  Finally, if your goal is to keep search results out of the index (it probably should be) then you should also highly consider using a meta robots NOINDEX tag on all search results pages. You can also slap a nofollow on links pointing to search results as this might also help Google steer clear of those pages.

                  Best of luck!

                  Edit: Here's what John Wu of Google Webmaster has to say...

                  "We show this warning when we find a high number of URLs on a site -- even before we attempt to crawl them. If you are blocking them with a robots.txt file, that's generally fine. If you really do have a high number of URLs on your site, you can generally ignore this message. If your site is otherwise small and we find a high number of URLs, then this kind of message can help you to fix any issues (or disallow access) before we start to access your server to check gazillions of URLs :-)."

                  Igal_Zeifman TalkInThePark 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • Igal_Zeifman
                    Igal_Zeifman @TalkInThePark last edited by

                    Didn't say it wasn't. 🙂

                    I`m just not sure how these rules apply to parameters, since they are not a part of the "core" URL.

                    (For example: What happens if I take a URL from your site, change a nocrawl=1 to nocrawl=0 and link to it from mine?
                    Do you have any URL sanitation rules in place to overcome that or will the page be indexed by Googlebot when it crawls my site and moves on to yours?)

                    Personally, when dealing with parameters, I find it easier to work with WMT so I was offering an easier workaround, (at least for me)

                    To tell you the truth, I would use hard-coded on page meta noindex/nofollow here (again, as parameters can be so easily manipulated).

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • TalkInThePark
                      TalkInThePark @Igal_Zeifman last edited by

                      Igal, thank your for replying.

                      But robots.txt disallowing URLs by matching patterns has been supported by Googlebot for a long time now.

                      Igal_Zeifman TalkInThePark 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Igal_Zeifman
                        Igal_Zeifman last edited by

                        Hi

                        I`m not sure if this is the best way to go about it.

                        Robots.txt is commonly used for folder level disallow rules, I`m not sure how it will respond to parameters.

                        Having said that, there are several things you can do here:

                        1. You can use WMT to zero in on this parameter and  prevent it from being searched.
                        To do so choose Configuration>>URL Parameters, answer "Yes" to the question about content change and  
                            check-in the 3rd bullet (Only URL with value...) Of course you'll need to choose "1" as the right value.

                        2. If this still didn't solve your issue, you might want to try using htacess + regex to prevent access by user agent.
                            You can find user-agent information here Googlebot user agent list

                        Also, you may want to check my blog post  about some of the less known Googlebot Facts (shameless self-promotion)

                        Best

                        Igal

                        TalkInThePark 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • TalkInThePark
                          TalkInThePark @dmccarthy last edited by

                          I'll send you a PW, Des.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • dmccarthy
                            dmccarthy last edited by

                            What the domain.?

                            TalkInThePark 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • 1 / 1
                            • First post
                              Last post

                            Got a burning SEO question?

                            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                            Start my free trial


                            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.

                            • See all categories

                            Related Questions

                            • mjukhud

                              Multiple robots.txt files on server

                              Hi! I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step. One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names: robots.txt (original dupplicate)
                              robots.txt-Original (original)
                              robots.txt-NEW (other content)
                              robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate) Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!

                              Technical SEO | | mjukhud
                              0
                            • Eurasmus.com

                              Log in, sign up, user registration and robots

                              Hi all, We have an accommodation site that asks users only to register when they want to book a room, in the last step. Though this is the ideal situation when you have tons of users, nowadays we are having around 1500 - 2000 per day and making tests we found out that if we ask for a registration (simple, 1 click FB) we mail them all and through a good customer service we are increasing our sales. That is why, we would like to ask users to register right after the home page ie Home/accommodation or and all the rest. I am not sure how can I make to make that content still visible to robots.
                              Will the authentication process block google crawling it? Maybe something we can do? We are  not completely sure how to proceed so any tip would be appreciated. Thank you all for answering.

                              Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
                              3
                            • mkhGT

                              Are robots.txt wildcards still valid? If so, what is the proper syntax for setting this up?

                              I've got several URL's that I need to disallow in my robots.txt file. For example, I've got several documents that I don't want indexed and filters that are getting flagged as duplicate content. Rather than typing in thousands of URL's I was hoping that wildcards were still valid.

                              Technical SEO | | mkhGT
                              0
                            • jmueller

                              Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?

                              Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
                              our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
                              Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
                              The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
                              First?
                              Last?
                              None? Thanks a lot,
                              Jan

                              Technical SEO | | jmueller
                              0
                            • joshcanhelp

                              Invisible robots.txt?

                              So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!

                              Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp
                              0
                            • ErnieB

                              Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??

                              I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help!  I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.

                              Technical SEO | | ErnieB
                              0
                            • WebsiteConsultants

                              How do you disallow HTTPS?

                              I currently have a site (startuploans.org) that runs everything as http, recently we decided to start an online application to process loan apps. Now, for one certain section we configured ssl to work (https://www.startuploans.org/secure/). If I go to the HTTPS url for any of my other pages they show up...I was going to just 301 everything from https but because it is in a subdirectiory I can't... Also, canonical URL's won't work either because it's a totally different system and the pages are generated in an odd manor. It's really just 1 page that needs to be disallowed.. Is there any way to disallow all HTTPS requests from robots.txt while keeping all the HTTP requests working as normal?

                              Technical SEO | | WebsiteConsultants
                              0
                            • aethereal

                              Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot

                              Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
                              Asim

                              Technical SEO | | aethereal
                              0

                            Get started with Moz Pro!

                            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                            Start my free trial
                            Products
                            • Moz Pro
                            • Moz Local
                            • Moz API
                            • Moz Data
                            • STAT
                            • Product Updates
                            Moz Solutions
                            • SMB Solutions
                            • Agency Solutions
                            • Enterprise Solutions
                            • Digital Marketers
                            Free SEO Tools
                            • Domain Authority Checker
                            • Link Explorer
                            • Keyword Explorer
                            • Competitive Research
                            • Brand Authority Checker
                            • Local Citation Checker
                            • MozBar Extension
                            • MozCast
                            Resources
                            • Blog
                            • SEO Learning Center
                            • Help Hub
                            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                            • How-to Guides
                            • Moz Academy
                            • API Docs
                            About Moz
                            • About
                            • Team
                            • Careers
                            • Contact
                            Why Moz
                            • Case Studies
                            • Testimonials
                            Get Involved
                            • Become an Affiliate
                            • MozCon
                            • Webinars
                            • Practical Marketer Series
                            • MozPod
                            Connect with us

                            Contact the Help team

                            Join our newsletter
                            Moz logo
                            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                            • Accessibility
                            • Terms of Use
                            • Privacy

                            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.