Block Googlebot from submit button
-
Hi,
I have a website where many searches are made by the googlebot on our internal engine. We can make noindex on result page, but we want to stop the bot to call the ajax search button - GET form (because it pass a request to an external API with associate fees).
So, we want to stop crawling the form button, without noindex the search page itself. The "nofollow" tag don't seems to apply on button's submit.
Any suggestion?
-
Hey Olivier,
You could detect the user agent and hide the button. The difference isn't substantial enough to be called cloaking.
Or you could make the button not actually a button tag, but another tag with that traps clicks with a JS event. I'm not sure Google's headless browser is smart enough to automate that. I would try this first and if it doesn't work switch to the user agent detection idea.
Let us know how it goes!
-Mike
-
-
Can always do it in a programme the bot's can't use or hide it behind a log in field etc.
I also give you the following for consumption :
http://moz.com/blog/12-ways-to-keep-your-content-hidden-from-the-search-engines
Good luck!
-
Hi Bernard
Are you able to provide a link to the web form containing the submit button?
Peter
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
-
Google blocks certain articles on my website ... !
Hello I have a website with more than 350 unique articles, Most of them are crawled by Google without a problem, but I find out certain articles are never indexed by Google. I tried to rewrite them, adding fresh images and optimizing them but it gets me nowhere. Lately, I rewrite an article of those and tried to (fetch and render) through Google Webmasters, and I found this result, can you tell me if there is anything to do to fix that? BMVh4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evcindex0 -
Https Homepage Redirect & Issue with Googlebot Access
Hi All, I have a question about Google correctly accessing a site that has a 301 redirect to https on the homepage. Here’s an overview of the situation and I’d really appreciate any insight from the community on what the issue might be: Background Info:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | G.Anderson
My homepage is set up as a 301 redirect to a https version of the homepage (some users log in so we need the SSL). Only 2 pages on the site are under SSL and the rest of the site is http. We switched to the SSL in July but have not seen any change in our rankings despite efforts increasing backlinks and out put of content. Even though Google has indexed the SSL page of the site, it appears that it is not linking up the SSL page with the rest of the site in its search and tracking. Why do we think this is the case? The Diagnosis: 1) When we do a Google Fetch on our http homepage, it appears that Google is only reading the 301 redirect instructions (as shown below) and is not finding its way over to the SSL page which has all the correct Page Title and meta information. <code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 17:26:24 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Location: https://mysite.com/ Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 242 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> # Moved Permanently The document has moved [here](https://mysite.com/). * * * <address>Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at mysite.com</address></code> 2) When we view a list of external backlinks to our homepage, it appears that the backlinks that have been built after we switched to the SSL homepage have been separated from the backlinks built before the SSL. Even on Open Site, we are only seeing the backlinks that were achieved before we switched to the SSL and not getting to track any backlinks that have been added after the SSL switch. This leads up to believe that the new links are not adding any value to our search rankings. 3) When viewing Google Webmaster, we are receiving no information about our homepage, only all the non-https pages. I added a https account to Google Webmaster and in that version we ONLY receive the information about our homepage (and the other ssl page on the site) What Is The Problem? My concern is that we need to do something specific with our sitemap or with the 301 redirect itself in order for Google to read the whole site as one entity and receive the reporting/backlinks as one site. Again, google is indexing all of our pages but it seems to be doing so in a disjointed way that is breaking down link juice and value being built up by our SSL homepage. Can anybody help? Thank you for any advice input you might be able to offer. -Greg0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why are these results being showed as blocked by robots.txt?
If you perform this search, you'll see all m. results are blocked by robots.txt: http://goo.gl/PRrlI, but when I reviewed the robots.txt file: http://goo.gl/Hly28, I didn't see anything specifying to block crawlers from these pages. Any ideas why these are showing as blocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Whole site blocked by robots in webmaster tools
My URL is: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.auThis new site has been re-crawled over last 2 weeks, and in webmaster tools index status the following is displayed:Indexed 50,000 pagesblocked by robots 69,000Search query 'site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au' returns 55,000 pagesHowever, all pages in the site do appear to be blocked and over the 2 weeks, the google search query site traffic declined from significant to zero (proving this is in fact the case ).This is a Linux php site and has the following: 55,000 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted successfully to webmaster toolsrobots.txt file existed but did not have any entries to allow or disallow URLs - today I have removed robots.txt file completely URL re-direction within Linux .htaccess file - there are many rows within this complex set of re-directions. Developer has double checked this file and found that it is valid.I have read everything that google and other sources have on this topic and this does not help. Also checked webmaster crawl errors, crawl stats, malware and there is no problem there related to this issue.Is this a duplicate content issue - this is a price comparison site where approx half the products have duplicate product descriptions - duplicated because they are obtained from the suppliers through an XML data file. The suppliers have the descriptions from the files in their own sites.Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrogers0 -
Large Site SEO - Dev Issue Forcing URL Change - 301, 302, Block, What To Do?
Hola, Thanks in advance for reading and trying to help me out. A client of mine recently created a large scale company directory (500k+ pages) in Drupal v6 while the "marketing" type pages of their site was still in manual hard-coded HTML. They redesigned their "marketing" pages, but used Drual v7. They're now experiencing server conflicts with both instances of Drupal not allowing them to communicate/be on the same server. Eventually the directory will be upgraded to Drupal v7, but could take weeks to months the client does not want to wait for the re-launch. The client wants to push the new marketing site live, but also does not want to ruin the overall SEO value of the directory and have a few options, but I'm looking to help guide them down the path of least resistance: Option 1: Move the company directory onto a subdomain and the "marketing site" on the www. subdomain. Client gets to push their redesign live, but large scale 301s to the directory cause major issues in terms of shaking up the structure of the site causing ripple effects into getting pulled out of the index for days to weeks. Rankings and traffic drop, subdomain authority gets lost and the company directory health looks bad for weeks to months. However, 301 maintains partial SEO value and some long tail traffic still exists. Once the directory gets moved to Drupal v7, the directory will then cancel the 301 to the subdomain and revert back to original www. subdomain URLs Option 2: Block the company directory from search engines with robots.txt and meta instructions, essentially cutting off the floodgates from the established marketing pages. No major scaling 301 ripple effect, directory takes a few weeks to filter out of the index, traffic is completely lost, however once drupal v7 gets upgraded and the directory is then re-opened, directory will then slowly gain back SEO value to get close to old rankings, traffic, etc. Option 3: 302 redirect? Lose all accumulate SEO value temporarily... hmm Option 4: Something else? As you can see, this is not an ideal situation. However, a decision has to be made and I'm looking to chose the lesser of evils. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again -Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bacon0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380 -
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP, but different Class C blocks..
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP same IP, but different Class C blocks. How do search engines treat the uniqie scenario of web hosting companies and linking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FirePowered0