Google showing high volume of URLs blocked by robots.txt in in index-should we be concerned?
-
if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site).
And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back
We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?
-
I think it's worth it. I'm not sure what CMS you're using, but it shouldn't take much time to add noindex,follow to the header of all your pages, and then remove the robots.txt directive that's preventing them from being crawled.
-
thanks--I am concerned about if we should go through the process of unblocking them--they are all showing in the SERPs with the "This URL is blocked by robots.txt"--is it worrisome that such a large % of our URLs in the SERPs are showing as blocked by robots.txt with the "omitted from search results" message?
-
If Google has already crawled/indexed the subdomains before, then adding noindex, follow is probably the best approach. This is because if you just block the sites with robots.txt, Google will still know that they pages exist, but won't be able to crawl them, resulting in it taking a long time for the pages to be de-indexed, if ever. Additionally, if those subdomains have any links, then that link value is lost because Google can't crawl the pages.
Adding noindex,follow will tell Google definitely to remove those subdomains from their index, as well as help preserve any link equity they've accumulated.
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
-
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Robots.txt gone wild
Hi guys, a site we manage, http://hhhhappy.com received an alert through web master tools yesterday that it can't be crawled. No changes were made to the site. Don't know a huge amount about the robots.txt configuration expect that using Yoast by default it sets it not to crawl wp admin folder and nothing else. I checked this against all other sites and the settings are the same. And yet 12 hours later after the issue Happy is still not being crawled and meta data is not showing in search results. Any ideas what may have triggered this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
When does Google index a fetched page?
I have seen where it will index on of my pages within 5 minutes of fetching, but have also read that it can take a day. I'm on day #2 and it appears that it has still not re-indexed 15 pages that I fetched. I changed the meta-description in all of them, and added content to nearly all of them, but none of those changes are showing when I do a site:www.site/page I'm trying to test changes in this manner, so it is important for me to know WHEN a fetched page has been indexed, or at least IF it has. How can I tell what is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening0 -
Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin1 -
If i disallow unfriendly URL via robots.txt, will its friendly counterpart still be indexed?
Our not-so-lovely CMS loves to render pages regardless of the URL structure, just as long as the page name itself is correct. For example, it will render the following as the same page: example.com/123.html example.com/dumb/123.html example.com/really/dumb/duplicative/URL/123.html To help combat this, we are creating mod rewrites with friendly urls, so all of the above would simply render as example.com/123 I understand robots.txt respects the wildcard (*), so I was considering adding this to our robots.txt: Disallow: */123.html If I move forward, will this block all of the potential permutations of the directories preceding 123.html yet not block our friendly example.com/123? Oh, and yes, we do use the canonical tag religiously - we're just mucking with the robots.txt as an added safety net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrwestern0 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810 -
Canonicalization issue? - URLs with and without trailing slashes showing up as unique
For some reason, our urls are set to change from “www.apprenda.com/ANYTHING" to “apprenda.com/ANYTHING” These register as different pages though? We have rankings in SEOMoz Pro for terms where our homepage shows up 6th on google, but SEOMoz says it's not on the first page because it's checking against apprenda.com and not www.apprenda.com Also, it seems like for some reason pages with trailing slashes also register differently than those without. Should we be doing something for that? Something to make sure all pages get rewritten to having the trailing slash or not? For instance, this url: http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy/ and this url” http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy are really the same page. Yet in our analytics, they register as different pages with their own stats, etc. What should we do in our particular case, and how can we get this fixed? I really appreciate the help, and thanks in advance! Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ApprendaPlatform0
