Robots.txt
-
Hi all,
Happy New Year!
I want to block certain pages on our site as they are being flagged (according to my Moz Crawl Report) as duplicate content when in fact that isn't strictly true, it is more to do with the problems faced when using a CMS system...
Here are some examples of the pages I want to block and underneath will be what I believe to be the correct robots.txt entry...
Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=search
http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports&rcom=gallery&imageId=980&ctyp=image
Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports
Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post
http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/small/
http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/large/
Disallow: /forum/gallery/sizes/
Any help \ advice would be much appreciated.
Many thanks
Andy
-
You may be better off just doing a pattern match if your CMS generates a lot of junk URLs. You could save yourself a lot of time and heartache with the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?That will block everything with with a ? in the string. So yeah, use with caution - as always.
If you're quite certain you want to block access to the image sizes subdirectory you may use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /sizes*/
More on all of that fun from Google and SEO Book.
Robots.txt is almost as unforgiving as .htaccess, especially once you start pattern matching. Make sure to test everything thoroughly before you push to a live environment. For serious. You have been warned.
Google WMT and Bing WMT also provide parameter handling tools. Once you tell Bing and/or Google that you want their bots to ignore urls with certain parameter(s) you select. So if you wanted to handle it that way, it looks like ignoring the app= parameter should do the trick for most of your expressed concerns.
Good luck! explosions in the distance XD
-
Thanks DC1611, I will look into the other options but I have hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of examples that I would need to investigate...
Andy
-
You can quite easily check if these filters work - using Google Webmastertools (crawl section > robots.txt tester).
In the test-tool you can enter the criteria & check if they do block Googlebot from indexing these pages. I tried a few of the examples you gave & they seem to work.Apart from updating your robots.txt (which seems quite a radical solution) you could also consider implementing canonical url's for these duplicate url's.
Another alternative is to configure url parameters in Google Webmastertools (also in the crawl section) - where you can indicate which parameters need to be ignored.
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
-
No index detected in robots meta tag GSC issue_Help Please
Hi Everyone, We just did a site migration ( URL structure change, site redesign, CMS change). During migration, dev team messed up badly on a few things including SEO. The old site had pages canonicalized and self canonicalized <> New site doesn't have anything (CMS dev error) so we are working retroactively to add canonicalization mechanism The legacy site had URL’s ending with a trailing slash “/” <> new site got redirected to Set of url’s without “/” New site action : All robots are allowed: A new sitemap is submitted to google search console So here is my problem (it been a long 24hr night for me 🙂 ) 1. Now when I look at GSC homepage URL it says that old page is self canonicalized and currently in index (old page with a trailing slash at the end of URL). 2. When I try to perform a live URL test, I get the message "No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag" , so indexation cant be done. I have no idea where noindex is coming from. 3. Robots.txt in search console still showing old file ( no noindex there ) I tried to submit new file but old one still coming up. When I click on "See live robots.txt" I get current robots. 4. I see that old page is still canonicalized and attempting to index redirected old page might be confusing google Hope someone can help to get the new page indexed! I really need it 🙂 Please ping me if you need more clarification. Thank you ! Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin1 -
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 -
Have a Robots.txt Issue
I have a robots.txt file error that is causing me loads of headaches and is making my website fall off the SE grid. on MOZ and other sites its saying that I blocked all websites from finding it. Could it be as simple as I created a new website and forgot to re-create a robots.txt file for the new site or it was trying to find the old one? I just created a new one. Google's website still shows in the search console that there are severe health issues found in the property and that it is the robots.txt is blocking important pages. Does this take time to refresh? Is there something I'm missing that someone here in the MOZ community could help me with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | primemediaconsultants0 -
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 -
MOZ crawl report says category pages blocked by meta robots but theyr'e not?
I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow. This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them. When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow? Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl? As yet these pages aren't indexed by google. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Sam.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Will disallowing in robots.txt noindex a page?
Google has indexed a page I wish to remove. I would like to meta noindex but the CMS isn't allowing me too right now. A suggestion o disallow in robots.txt would simply stop them crawling I expect or is it also an instruction to noindex? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4