Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
-
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages).
Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
-
Me too. It was that video that helped to clear things up for me. Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag. It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.
-
Good stuff. I was always under the impression they still crawled them (otherwise, how would you know if the block was removed).
-
Take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
to see what I am talking about.
Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.
-
Robots.txt prevents indexation, not crawling. The good news is that Googlebot stops crawling 404s.
-
Just a couple of under the hood things to check.
-
Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.
-
This may be a timing issue. Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?
If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue. If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it found.
-
I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association. In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page. You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.
-
If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do. Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.
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"
Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors. Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index. It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
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 -
Why did this website disappear from Google's SERPs?
For the first several months this website, WEBSITE, ranked well in Google for several local search terms like, "Columbia MO spinal decompression" and "Columbia, MO car accident therapy." Recently the website has completely disappeared from Google's SEPRs. It does not even exist when I copy and paste full paragraphs into Google's search bar. The website still ranks fine in Bing and Yahoo, but something happened that caused it to be removed from Google. Beside for optimizing the meta data, adding headers, alt tags, and all of the typical on-page SEO stuff, we did create a guest post for a relevant, local blog. Here is the post: Guest Post. The post's content is 100% unique. I realize the post has way to many internal/external links, which we definitely did not recommend, but can anyone find a reason why this website was removed from Google's SERPs? And possibly how we should go about getting it back into Google's SERPs? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VentaMarketing0 -
Do 404 pages pass link juice? And best practices...
Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great 404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?1 -
Will blocking urls in robots.txt void out any backlink benefits? - I'll explain...
Ok... So I add tracking parameters to some of my social media campaigns but block those parameters via robots.txt. This helps avoid duplicate content issues (Yes, I do also have correct canonical tags added)... but my question is -- Does this cause me to miss out on any backlink magic coming my way from these articles, posts or links? Example url: www.mysite.com/subject/?tracking-info-goes-here-1234 Canonical tag is: www.mysite.com/subject/ I'm blocking anything with "?tracking-info-goes-here" via robots.txt The url with the tracking info of course IS NOT indexed in Google but IT IS indexed without the tracking parameters. What are your thoughts? Should I nix the robots.txt stuff since I already have the canonical tag in place? Do you think I'm getting the backlink "juice" from all the links with the tracking parameter? What would you do? Why? Are you sure? 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AubieJon0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0