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
-
How do I complete a reverse DNS check when completing log file analysis?
I'm doing some log file analysis and need to run a reverse DNS check to ensure that I'm analysing logs from Google and not any imposters. Is there a command I can use in terminal to do this? If not, whats the best way to verify Googlebot? Thanks
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
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 -
Huge ranking difference between google and bing
I am trying to rank for the keyword "trash bags" I did a lot of on-page optimization and link building. We started ranking #2 on bing and yahoo but google seems to be stubbornly fluctuating between being as high as 20 and as low as 45 and even dropped our rankings for a couple of weeks. Is there any need for concern if google is acting so different from bing/yahoo?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0