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.
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
-
Hi SEOmoz,
I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?.
I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective?
How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your reply!
Unfortunately the problem is yet to be fixed, I hope that my disallow will work shortly.
It seems that most of the index.php links to each other internally (and from old /index.php/ pages that no longer exist), which is super weird. How google found them does not make any sense to me.
I don't beleive that external sources are linking to these pages either - I mean, how would they find these links anyway?.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Like Chris, I spidered your site and couldn't find any links to /index.php files, which probably indicates one of two things:
- You've fixed the problem - Yay!
- Or Google is finding those links from external sources
- Google found those links at one time in the past, and is still trying to crawl them.
In the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, if you click on the link of each 404, there's often a "linked from" source where you can see where Google discovered the broken link. This is really helpful in rooting out the cause.
Regardless, I'm going to go with #1 and optimistically believe that you were able to fix the problem.
-
If I spider your site I'm not seeing any /index.php urls. Does that mean you did get Joomla to cooperate with your rewriting?
Or was your problem that you'd previously had urls indexed with /index.php/ paths and you needed to remove them?
-
Hi Mikkel, I have checked your robots.txt, it looks perfect. If you redirect /index.php to home page that using httaccess file or by using any joomla plugin that would great for you. And its also a permanent solution.
-
Well, I tried the sensible solution and redirecting to the correct URL instead. However the SEF program is quite limited and keep on creating new URLs regardless of my modification. Im looking for a more permanent solution, and the disallow seems at bit simple as I'm not a super programmer.
By the way - thanks for quick replys, kudos to both of you!
-
Sure, the website in question is www.vauni.dk
I don't think that there is any inbound links to the index.php pages. They are not easily found.
-
Couldn't you rewrite those /index.php/ urls to remove the /index.php/?
Like this in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Only used Joomla once, but there must be a way to configure joomla to just use "/" instead of "/index.php/"?
Update:
Here's a solution to your /index.php/ issue:
http://www.eprcreations.com/remove-index-php-from-joomla-urls/
Once you've updated that, and have your urls working properly without the /index.php/, you could add this slight modification of the rewrite rule above so that all your old /index.php/ urls would be 301'd to your new ones:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,L]
Put it underneath the RewriteBase / line they describe in that post.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Do you inbound link pointing to you index.php pages ? If yes, then it might affect your seo. Disallow: /index.ph/ is perfect but after implementing it don't inter link those index.php pages. Can you share me your website URL so that I can show you with example. How to do it.
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
-
Robots.txt Tester - syntax not understood
I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
Jim0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
My Homepage Won't Load if Javascript is Disabled. Is this an SEO/Indexation issue?
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client who recently had their site redesigned. I'm just going through to do an initial audit to make sure everything looks good. Part of my initial indexation audit goes through questions about how the site functions when you disable, javascript, cookies, and/or css. I use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to do this. I know, more recently, people have said that content loaded by Javascript will be indexed. I just want to make sure it's not hurting my clients SEO. http://americasinstantsigns.com/ Is it as simple as looking at Google's Cached URL? The URL is definitely being indexed and when looking at the text-only version everything appears to be in order. This may be an outdated question, but I just want to be sure! Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | ccox10 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt
Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg0 -
/~username
Hello, The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors. Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse? Thanks, Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?
Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | | christinarule1