Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    15
    3273
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Ria_
      Ria_ last edited by

      So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them.

      Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789=

      All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe?

      Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Andy.Drinkwater
        Andy.Drinkwater @Ria_ last edited by

        No problem 🙂

        Hope you get it sorted!

        -Andy

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Ria_
          Ria_ @DirkC last edited by

          Thank you! 😄

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Ria_
            Ria_ @Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

            Haha, I think the train passed the station on that one. I would have realised eventually... XD

            Thanks for your help!

            Andy.Drinkwater 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • DirkC
              DirkC last edited by

              Don't forget that . & ? have a specific meaning within regex - if you want to use them for pattern matching you will have to escape them. Also be aware that not all bots are capable of interpreting regex in robots.txt - you might want to be more explicit on the user agent - only using regex for Google bot.

              User-agent: Googlebot

              #disallowing page.php and any parameters after it

              disallow: /page.php

              #but leaving anything that starts with par1=ABC

              allow: page.php?par1=ABC

              Dirk

              Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Andy.Drinkwater
                Andy.Drinkwater @Ria_ last edited by

                Ah sorry I missed that bit!

                -Andy

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Andy.Drinkwater
                  Andy.Drinkwater @Ria_ last edited by

                  Disallowing them would be my first priority really, before removing from index.

                  The trouble with this is that if you disallow first, Google won't be able to crawl the page to act on the noindex. If you add a noindex flag, Google won't index them the next time it comes-a-crawling and then you will be good to disallow 🙂

                  I'm not actually sure of the best way for you to get the noindex in to the page header of those pages though.

                  -Andy

                  Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Ria_
                    Ria_ @Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

                    Yep, have done. (Briefly mentioned in my previous response.) Doesn't pass 😞

                    Andy.Drinkwater 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Ria_
                      Ria_ @Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                      I thought so too, but according to Google the trailing wildcard is completely unnecessary, and only needs to be used mid-URL.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Ria_
                        Ria_ @Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

                        Hi Andy,

                        Disallowing them would be my first priority really, before removing from index. Didn't want to remove them before I've blocked Google from crawling them in case they get added back again next time Google comes a-crawling, as has happened before when I've simply removed a URL here and there. Does that make sense or am I getting myself mixed up here?

                        My other hack of a solution would be to check the URL in the page.php, and if URL includes par1=ABC then insert noindex meta tag. (Not sure if that would work well or not...)

                        Andy.Drinkwater 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                          Martijn_Scheijbeler @Ria_ last edited by

                          My guess would be that this line needs an * at the end.
                          Allow: /page.php?par1=ABC*

                          Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Andy.Drinkwater
                            Andy.Drinkwater @Ria_ last edited by

                            Sorry Martijn, just to jump in here for a second - Ria, you can test this via the Robots.txt testing tool in search console before going live to make sure it work.

                            -Andy

                            Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • Ria_
                              Ria_ @Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                              Hi Martijn, thanks for your response!

                              I'm currently looking at something like this...

                              **user-agent: *** #disallowing page.php and any parameters after it
                              disallow: /page.php #but leaving anything that starts with par1=ABC
                              allow: /page.php?par1=ABC

                              I would have thought that you could disallow things broadly like that and give an exception, as you can with files in disallowed folders. But it's not passing Google's robots.txt Tester.

                              One thing that's probably worth mentioning really is that there are only two variables that I want to allow of the par1 parameter. For example's sake, ABC123 and ABC456. So would need to be either a partial match or "this or that" kinda deal, disallowing everything else.

                              Andy.Drinkwater Martijn_Scheijbeler 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Andy.Drinkwater
                                Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

                                Hi Ria,

                                I have never tried regular expressions in this way, so I can't tell you if this would work or not.

                                However, If all 1000 of these URL's are already indexed, just disallowing access won't then remove them from Google. You would ideally be able to place a noindex tag on those pages and let Google act on them, then you will be good to disallow. I am pretty sure there is no option to noindex under the URL Parameter Tool.

                                I hope that makes sense?

                                -Andy

                                Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Martijn_Scheijbeler
                                  Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

                                  Hi Ria,

                                  What you could do, but it also depends on the rest of your structure is Disallow these urls based on the parameters (what you could do in a worst case scenario is that you would disallow all URLs and then put an exception Allow in there as well to make sure you still have the right URLs being indexed).

                                  Martijn.

                                  Ria_ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • 1 / 1
                                  • First post
                                    Last post

                                  Got a burning SEO question?

                                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                  Start my free trial


                                  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.

                                  • See all categories

                                  Related Questions

                                  • angelamaemae

                                    Search console validation taking a long time?

                                    Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing. Thank you! ^_^

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae
                                    0
                                  • Lauriedechaseaux

                                    Displaying Vanity URL in Google Search Result

                                    Hi Moz! Not sure if this has been asked before, but is there any way to tell Google to display a vanity URL (that has been 301d) instead of the actual URL in the SERP? Example: www.domainA.com is a vanity URL (bought specifically for Brand Identity reasons) that redirects to www.domainB.com. Is it possible to have the domainA Url show up in Google for a Branded search query? Thanks in advance! Arjun

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lauriedechaseaux
                                    0
                                  • peteboyd

                                    URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?

                                    A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
                                    0
                                  • rhoadesjohn

                                    Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!

                                    Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time.  It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1.  DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31.  It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2.  The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized?  And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking.  I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a.  There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b.  For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html.  Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not.  If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn
                                    1
                                  • PottyScotty

                                    Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea

                                    Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites.  Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities.  e.g. Stirling
                                    Stirling paintball
                                    Stirling Go Karting
                                    Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns.  At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive!  Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
                                    0
                                  • boxcarpress

                                    Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products

                                    We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not. Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is: http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be: http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/ I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment. So I guess the questions are: Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep? Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress
                                    0
                                  • nicole.healthline

                                    Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?

                                    We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                                    0
                                  • JamesO

                                    To subnav or NOT to subnav... that's my question.... :)

                                    We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
                                      >> 2 Round Packages
                                      >> 3 Round Packages
                                      >> 4 Round Packages
                                      >> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
                                      >> North End Courses
                                      >> Central Courses
                                      >> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful?  Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?

                                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
                                    0

                                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                  Start my free trial
                                  Products
                                  • Moz Pro
                                  • Moz Local
                                  • Moz API
                                  • Moz Data
                                  • STAT
                                  • Product Updates
                                  Moz Solutions
                                  • SMB Solutions
                                  • Agency Solutions
                                  • Enterprise Solutions
                                  • Digital Marketers
                                  Free SEO Tools
                                  • Domain Authority Checker
                                  • Link Explorer
                                  • Keyword Explorer
                                  • Competitive Research
                                  • Brand Authority Checker
                                  • Local Citation Checker
                                  • MozBar Extension
                                  • MozCast
                                  Resources
                                  • Blog
                                  • SEO Learning Center
                                  • Help Hub
                                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                  • How-to Guides
                                  • Moz Academy
                                  • API Docs
                                  About Moz
                                  • About
                                  • Team
                                  • Careers
                                  • Contact
                                  Why Moz
                                  • Case Studies
                                  • Testimonials
                                  Get Involved
                                  • Become an Affiliate
                                  • MozCon
                                  • Webinars
                                  • Practical Marketer Series
                                  • MozPod
                                  Connect with us

                                  Contact the Help team

                                  Join our newsletter
                                  Moz logo
                                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                  • Accessibility
                                  • Terms of Use
                                  • Privacy

                                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.