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.
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
-
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google.
Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS.
They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index?
We don't want these pages to be found.
-
That's why I mentioned: "eventually". But thanks for the added information. Hopefully it's clear now for the original poster.
-
Looking at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0&feature=youtu.be Matt Cutts advises to use the noindex tag on every individual page. However, this is very time consuming if you're dealing wit a large volume of pages.
The other option he recommends is to use the robots.txt file as well as the URL removal tool in GWMT, Although this is the second choice option, it does seem easier for us to implement than the noindex tag.
-
Hi,
Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.
-
Hi Nico
Great response thanks.
This is certainly something I'm taking into consideration and will question my developer about this.
-
Thanks Thomas.
I'm now finding out from my developer is we are able to noindex these pages with the meta robots.
If this is something that isn't possible, it's likely that we'll add to the robots.txt as you did.
Either way I think will be progress to different degrees.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
Completely agree, I have done the same for a website I am doing work with, ideally we would noindex with meta robots however that isn't possible. So instead we added to the robots.txt, the number of indexed pages have dropped, yet when you search exactly it just says the description can't be reached.
So I was happy with the results as they're now not ranking for the terms they were.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.
The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...
At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.
So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)
Regards
Nico
-
Thanks Martijn. This is what I was assuming would happen. However, I got a confusing message from my developer which said the following,
"won't remove the URL's from the index but it will mean that they will only show up for very specific searches that customers are extremely unlikely to use. It will also increase Asgard's crawl budget as Google and Bing won't try to crawl these URLs. Would you be happy with this solution?"
I would tend to still agree with your statement though.
-
Yes they will be eventually. As you disallow Google to crawl the URLs it will probably start hiding the descriptions for some of these image pages soon as they can't crawl them anymore. Then at some point they'll stop looking at them at all.
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
-
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0
