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 Disallow Backslash - Is it right command
-
Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character
ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product
www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product
Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk
Need to know for command :-
User-agent: * Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,
-
Thanks, you seem lucky to me.. Almost after 2 month i have got the code for making all these encoded url's redirect correctly. Finally, now if one types
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
then he's redirected through 301 to the correct url
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
-
Hello Gagan,
I think the best way to handle this would be using the rel canonical tag or rewriting the URLs to get rid of the parameters and replace them with something more user-friendly.
The rel canonical tag would be the easiest way out of those two. I notice the version without the encoding (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 ) have a rel canonical tag that correctly references itself as the canonical version. However, the encoded URLs (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10) which is actually http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 does NOT have a rel canonical tag.
If the version with the backslash had a rel canonical tag stating that the following URL is canonical it would solve your issue, I think.
Canonical URL:
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 -
Sure, If i show you some url they are crawled as :-
Sample Incorrect URLs crawled and reported as duplicate one in Google Webmaster & Moz too
|
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
| http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=category&Itemid=2 |
|
Correct URL
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2
What we found online
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. URLs cannot contain spaces.
%22 reflects - " and %5c as \ (forward slash)
We intend to remove these duplicate one created having %22 and %5c within them..
Many thanks
-
I am not entirely sure I understood your question as intended, but I will do my best to answer.
I would not put this in my robots.txt flie because it could possibly be misunderstood as a forward slash, in which case your entire domain would be blocked:
Disallow: \
We can possibly provide you with some alternative suggestions on how to keep Google from crawling those pages if you could share some real examples.
It may be best to rewrite/redirect those URls instead since they don't seem to be the canonical version you intend to be presented to the user.
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
-
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Robots.txt: how to exclude sub-directories correctly?
Hello here, I am trying to figure out the correct way to tell SEs to crawls this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/ But not this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory/ or this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/sub-directory/... But with the fact I have thousands of sub-directories with almost infinite combinations, I can't put the following definitions in a manageable way: disallow: /directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/subdirectory/ etc... I would end up having thousands of definitions to disallow all the possible sub-directory combinations. So, is the following way a correct, better and shorter way to define what I want above: allow: /directory/$ disallow: /directory/* Would the above work? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau1 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0
