Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
-
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
-
Hey Dan,
I am actually not so concerned about the pages being indexed. I don't really think they were ever de-indexed. Unless I am wrong, I think they were de-ranked.
I know others have said that when they "disallowed" large portions of their sites, their pages dropped in the rankings, and did not necessarily disappear. This is more what I want to see recovery from.
Thanks!
Craig
-
Craig
D'you have screaming frog? BEST way to make sure you're all set is - run a crawl with Screaming Frog. By default it will acknowledge robots.txt and not crawl anything being blocked. Set the user agent to Googlebot.
If it crawls all the pages you want it to just fine, than you are all set!
-Dan
-
Thanks for jumping in Dan. The number of blocked pages, over a month later is still way up there. It really has barely gone done. As of today it is at 904,000.
So, we still wait and hope that:
A. That many pages aren't actually blocked (whatever blocked actually means.)
B. The rate at which that number falls will begin to increase.
Thanks for your answer!
Craig
-
Hey There
I see this question is a bit old ... are you still have these issues? If so, when you say "going down" do you mean according to the numbers showing in Webmaster Tools?
I do know that quite often there can be a delay in the data in Webmaster Tools (especially the indexation report which you may be referring to).
I don't think there's any harm in updating the dates to reflect the most recent version of the page, so long as they are accurate.
Let me know if that helps or if you're all set.
-Dan
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Very wierd pages. 2900 403 errors in page crawl for a site that only has 140 pages.
Hi there, I just made a crawl of the website of one of my clients with the crawl tool from moz. I have 2900 403 errors and there is only 140 pages on the website. I will give an exemple of what the crawl error gives me. | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | | | | | | | | | | There are 2900 pages like this. I have tried visiting the pages and they work, but they are only html pages without CSS. Can you guys help me to see what the problems is. We have experienced huge drops in traffic since Septembre.
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Pricing value pages
We have the main pricing page here: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/pricing Then depending on what you click, you'll be taken to the appropriate form on one of these pages: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=audit https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=saas https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=perpetual https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=subscription How should I handle these? Noindex, follow? Set a canonical? I keep getting notifications that these are duplicate content, but it's just a way to keep the form fills organized. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | eGInnovations1 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Why blocking a subfolder dropped indexed pages with 10%?
Hy Guys, maybe you can help me to understand better: on 17.04 I had 7600 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 6113). I have included in the robots.txt file, Disallow: /account/ - which contains the registration page, wishlist, etc. and other stuff since I'm not interested to rank with registration form. on 23.04 I had 6980 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 5985). I understand that this way I'm telling google I don't want that section indexed, by way so manny pages?, Because of the faceted navigation? Cheers
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I just had my site crawled by the seomoz robot and it came back with some errors. Basically it seems the categories and dates are not crawling directly. I'm a SEO newbie here Below is a capture of the video of what I am talking about. Any ideas on how to fix this? Hkpekchp
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
How do fix twin home pages
Search engine analysis is indicating that my site has twin home pages (www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com). The error message I'm getting is: "your website resides at both www.mysite.com and mysite.com. My uploaded index page is a .htm page (not .html). I don't know if that matters. Can someone explain how this happened and what I can do to fix it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | finalfrontier0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0