Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
-
Hey All,
So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it?
We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all.
In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt
Disallow: /*&viagra
Disallow: /*&Viagra
I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious.
Thanks!
Jon
-
Hey Paul,
Great answer, for some reason it totally slipped my mind that robots.txt is a crawling directive and not an index one. Yes the pages return a 404 on the headers. I've grabbed a copy of the complete SERPS and will now manually disallow them.
Thanks!
Jon
-
Thank for the endorsement, Christy! Funny, I only just now saw Rand's recent WBF related to this topic, but pleased to see my answer lines up exactly with his info.
P.
-
You need to be aware, Jonathan, that there is absolutely nothing about a robots.txt disallow that will help remove a URL from the search engine indexes. Robots is a crawling directive, NOT an indexing directive. In fact, in most cases, blocking URLs in robots.txt will actually cause them to remain in the index even longer.
I'm assuming you have cleaned up the site so the actual spam URLs no longer resolve. Those URLs should now result in a 404 error page. You must confirm they are actually returning the correct 404 code in the headers. As long as this is the case, it is a matter of waiting while the search engines crawl the spam URLs often enough to recognise they are really gone and remove them from the index. The problem with adding them to the robots.txt is that is actually telling the search engines NOT to crawl them, so they are unlikely to discover that they lead to 404s, hence they may remain in the index even longer.
Unfortunately you can't use a no-index tag on the offending pages, because the pages should no longer exist on the site. I don't think even a careful implementation of a X-Robots noindex directive in htaccess would work, because the URLs should be resulting in a 404.
Make certain the problem URLs return a clean 404, use the Google Search Console Remove URLs tool for as many of them as you can (for example you can request removal for entire directories, if the spam happened to be built that way), and then be patient for the rest. But do NOT block them in robots.txt - you'll just prolong the agony and waste your time.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
-
Hi Jon,
Why not just: Disallow: /viagra
-
Jon,
I have never done it with a robots.txt, one easy why that I think you could do it would be on the page level. You could add a noindex nofollow to the page itself.
You can generate it automatically too and have it fired depending on the url by using a substring search on the url as well. That will get them all for sure.
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
-
URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers Symptoms : On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap However, those URLs are in the sitemap Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message Potential explanation : We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017. We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ? We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZozoMe0 -
Google robots.txt test - not picking up syntax errors?
I just ran a robots.txt file through "Google robots.txt Tester" as there was some unusual syntax in the file that didn't make any sense to me... e.g. /url/?*
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
/url/?
/url/* and so on. I would use ? and not ? for example and what is ? for! - etc. Yet "Google robots.txt Tester" did not highlight the issues... I then fed the sitemap through http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-tester/robots-checker.php and that tool actually picked up my concerns. Can anybody explain why Google didn't - or perhaps it isn't supposed to pick up such errors? Thanks, Luke0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg454540 -
Robots.txt help
Hi Moz Community, Google is indexing some developer pages from a previous website where I currently work: ddcblog.dev.examplewebsite.com/categories/sub-categories Was wondering how I include these in a robots.txt file so they no longer appear on Google. Can I do it under our homepage GWT account or do I have to have a separate account set up for these URL types? As always, your expertise is greatly appreciated, -Reed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
URL language on Global Sites
Has anyone looked into a page not ranking as well because the URL is in English when the subdomain is geared for a different country and different language? I can defiantly see this taking away from the user experience, but didn't know if there was any concrete evidence or case studies that would show if it is a big deal or not for rankability? I know this is a backwards question to begin with because the priority over rankability is always UX, but there may not be a way to fix it unless I can prove it is a big deal.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Henry0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Multiple URLs for the same page
I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!0