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.
Does Bing ignore robots txt files?
-
Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk
Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site
http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google?
Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below.
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg
Any insights welcome
-
Thanks Clever PHD - we are now adding your recommendations to our preview sites
-
I know this does not sound related, but Matt Cutts explains this same situation on Google. It is probably the same reasoning for Bing.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/
Looking at your screen shot, it looks as if all that is being shown in Bing is just the URL, no title tag, description, no other information.
What Matt says is that they did not technically crawl the url, but they are aware that it exists. Example, there is another page linking to it with related content or the anchor tag on the link relates to the keyword search you are performing.
You are searching for the URL specifically and so it makes sense that they would show the URL as it relates to that search, but they are not showing any information from the page as they do not have it as they did not spider it, again, they are just aware of the URL. Kind of like talking to a lawyer eh?
If you search for any other keywords does this excluded site show up? Probably not. If the do, then they are probably only showing the URL like in the example above.
The video has more details. Here are the solutions he gives, I will outline them as well
-
Use the Bing URL removal tool - bing bang boom. Done.
-
(my new favorite) Let the page / site be indexed but then show an noindex nofollow meta tag on the page / site. There is a subtle but important difference in the meta tag vs the robot.txt file. The spiders have to be able to crawl the page to be able to see what they are supposed to do with it.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it."
The thing is, if you have a robots.txt file that says don't crawl the site, then the spider never gets to the noindex meta tag to know to delete the page from the index. It sounds a little backwards, but when the page is already in the search index, you have to let the spider crawl it to then see the noindex tag so that the search engine will know to remove it from the index.
Here is what you can do as this seems to only be an issue with Bing and just with the home page. Open up the robots.txt to allow Bing to crawl the site. Restrict the crawling to the home page only and exclude all the other pages from the crawl.
On the home page that you allow Bing to crawl, add the noindex no follow meta tag and you should be set.
All of that said.
If you have a single URL listed in bing with no meta data, it may not be worth all the above effort as you are not ranking for any valuable key words, but that is your call
It is always interesting to see how the spiders and engines think so I wanted to pass this along.
Cheers!
PS - If you have a ton of pages like this - then you just would allow Bing to crawl them all and add the noindex nofollow tag to all of them.
-
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
-
Bing Webmaster Shows Domain without WWW
One of our sites shows thousands of 301 redirects due to domain without www in Bing Webmaster under crawl Information page. It’s been like this for a long time. None of the internal pages have domain without www, it was tested through Screaming Frog. We do have www preference set in google webmaster, but unfortunately bing doesn’t have this option. We also specify URL with www preference through structural data, but that still doesn’t help. Did anyone have similar problems with Bing, and how did you resolve it?
Technical SEO | | rkdc1 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
Recommended log file analysis software for OS X?
Due to some questions over direct traffic and Googlebot behavior, I want to do some log file analysis. The catch is this is a Mac shop, so all our systems are on OS X. I have Windows 8 running in an emulator, but for the sake of simplicity I'd rather run all my software in OS X. This post by Tim Resnik recommended Web Log Explorer, but it's for Windows only. I did discover Sawmill, which claims to run on any platform. Any other suggestions? Bear in mind our site is load balanced over three servers, so please take that into consideration.
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Guys & Gals anyone know if urllist.txt is still used?
I'm using a tool which generates urllist.txt and looking on the SEO Forums it seems that Yahoo used to use this. What I'd like to know is is it still used anywhere and should we have it on the site?
Technical SEO | | danwebman0 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
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/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Robots.txt Sitemap with Relative Path
Hi Everyone, In robots.txt, can the sitemap be indicated with a relative path? I'm trying to roll out a robots file to ~200 websites, and they all have the same relative path for a sitemap but each is hosted on its own domain. Basically I'm trying to avoid needing to create 200 different robots.txt files just to change the domain. If I do need to do that, though, is there an easier way than just trudging through it?
Technical SEO | | MRCSearch0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0