Robots.txt assistance
-
I want to block all the inner archive news pages of my website in robots.txt - we don't have R&D capacity to set up rel=next/prev or create a central page that all inner pages would have a canonical back to, so this is the solution.
The first page I want indexed reads:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=1all subsequent pages that I want blocked because they don't contain any new content read:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=2
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=3
etc....There are currently 245 inner archived pages and I would like to set it up so that future pages will automatically be blocked since we are always writing new news pieces. Any advice about what code I should use for this?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for all the input and advice!
We are a gaming site that publishes industry news 2-3 times a week, but that is not our main source of income
-
"I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction"
Absolutely.
-
Thanks Andy. I did see that and that is why I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction.
If they are short on money/resources/capacity and the robots.txt solution could actually negatively impact indexation of content that is producing/justifying the current level of money/resources/capacity they could end up in worse position than where they started, i.e. having less money/resources/capacity.
-
If you read the original post again, Sara says "we don't have R&D capacity".
They wouldn't be able to do all this.
-Andy
-
I think you are missing something here if you want to get these pages out of the index. Plus, your use of Robots may harm how Google finds and ranks your actual news items.
First, you have to add the noindex meta tag to pages 2-N in your pagination. Let Google crawl them and take them out of the index.
If you just add them to robots.txt, Google will not crawl, but will also not remove them from the index.
Once you get them out of the index, keeping those tags in place will prevent reindexation and you don't have to add them to Robots.txt.
More importantly, you want pages 2-N being spidered but not indexed. You want Google to crawl your paginated pages to find all of your deep content. Otherwise, unless you have a XML or HTML sitemap, or some other crawlable navigational aid, you are actually preventing Google from crawling and then ranking your content.
Read this Moz post
http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
There is a section titled "Why Meta Robots is Better than Robots.txt" that will confirm my points.
Lastly. Step back a second. If you are a news/content site and this helps you to generate revenue, and you have a bunch of news pages, and this is important content, spend some money on Development to implement the rel=next/prev. It is worth it to get Google crawling your stuff properly.
Good luck!
-
Definitely something to test. I'm not sure of the rules that Google will apply with this and which way round works.
-Andy
-
I think it has to be the other way around: Disallow: /?p=* Allow: /?p=1 as you want to first disallow everything with the P parameter but then allow the first page. You should test it but I think in Andy's example you will still block the first page which you've just allowed.
-
I haven't actually done this myself, but I suspect that pattern matching is your solution here.
However, what you want to be able to do is disallow the whole pattern and then allow just the first page:
Allow: /?p=1 Disallow: /?p=*
The thing I don't have the answer to, is if this will work by first allowing the page 1, and then blocking all others. I don't have a method for this in blocking via robots as this is normally handed with other solutions you mention.
You can try it though through Webmaster tools:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- Under Crawl, click Blocked URLs.
- If it's not already selected, click the** Test robots.txt** tab.
- Copy the content of your robots.txt file, and paste it into the first box.
- In the URLs box, list the site to test against.
- In the User-agents list, select the user-agents you want.
-Andy
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 was set to disallow for 14 days
We updated our website and accidentally overwrote our robots file with a version that prevented crawling ( "Disallow: /") We realized the issue 14 days later and replaced after our organic visits began to drop significantly and we quickly replace the robots file with the correct version to begin crawling again. With the impact to our organic visits, we have a few and any help would be greatly appreciated - Will the site get back to its original status/ranking ? If so .. how long would that take? Is there anything we can do to speed up the process ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jc42540 -
Robots.txt Help
I need help to create robots.txt file. Please let me know what to add in the file. any real example or working example.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Robots.txt and redirected backlinks
Hey there, since a client's global website has a very complex structure which lead to big duplicate content problems, we decided to disallow crawler access and instead allow access to only a few relevant subdirectories. While indexing has improved since this I was wondering if we might have cut off link juice. Since several backlinks point to the disallowed root directory and are from there redirected (301) to the allowed directory I was wondering if this could cause any problems? Example: If there is a backlink pointing to example.com (disallowed in robots.txt) and is redirected from there to example.com/uk/en (allowed in robots.txt). Would this cut off the link juice? Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
Robots.txt for Facet Results
Hi Does anyone know how to properly add facets URL's to Robots txt? E.g. of our facets URL - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/platform-trolleys-trucks#facet:-10028265807368&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:5&pageView:list& Everything after the # will need to be blocked on all pages with a facet. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Massive URL blockage by robots.txt
Hello people, In May there has been a dramatic increase in blocked URLs by robots.txt, even though we don't have so many URLs or crawl errors. You can view the attachment to see how it went up. The thing is the company hasn't touched the text file since 2012. What might be causing the problem? Can this result any penalties? Can indexation be lowered because of this? ?di=1113766463681
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moneywise_test0 -
Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?
Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Is our robots.txt file correct?
Could you please review our robots.txt file and let me know if this is correct. www.faithology.com/robots.txt Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file
I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it? So something like /_Q1. Will that pickup and block every URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1. So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo1234560