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.
Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
-
Hi
I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google.
Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!!
Thanks
-
Thanks again AL123al!
I would be concerned about my internal linking because of this problem. I've always wanted to keep important pages within 3 clicks of the Homepage. My worry here is that while these products can get clicked by a user within 3 clicks of the Homepage, they're blocked to Googlebot.
So the product URLS are only getting crawled in the sitemap, which would be hugely ineffcient? So I think I have to decide whether opening up these pages will improve my linking structure for Google to crawl the product pages, but is that important than increasing the amount of pages it's able to crawl and wasting crawl budget?
-
Hello,
The canonical product URLS will be getting crawled just fine as they are not blocked in the robots.txt. Without understanding your problem completely, I think the guys before you were trying to stop all the duplicate URLS with parameters being crawled and just leaving Google to crawl the canonicals - which is what you want.
If you remove the parameter from robots.txt then Google will crawl everything including the parameter URLS. This will waste crawl budget. So better that Google is only crawling the canonicals.
Regarding the sitemap, being present on the sitemap will help Googlebot decide what to prioritise crawling but won't stop it finding other URLS if there is good internal linking.
-
Thanks AL123al! The base URL's (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes) do seem to be getting crawled here & there, and some are ranking which is great. But I think the only place they can get crawled is the sitemap, which has has over 28,000 URLs on one page (another thing I need to fix)!
So if Googlebot gets to the parameter URL through category pages (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid...) and sees it's blocked, I'm guessing it can't see it's important to us (from the website hierarchy) or the canonical tag, so I'm presuming it's seriously damaging or power in getting products ranked
In Screaming Frog, 112,000 get crawled and 68% are blocked by robots. 17,000 are URL's which contain "?cgid", which I don't think is too big for Googlebot to crawl, the websites has a pretty good authority so I think we have a pretty deep crawl.
So I suppose what really want to know is will removing "?cgid" from the robots file really damage the site? I my opinion, I think it'll really help
-
This looks like the products are being appended by a parameter ?cgid - there may be other stuff attached to the end of each URL like this below:
e.g. www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid-product=19&controller=product etc
but canonical URL is www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes
These products may have had a canonical to the base URL which means that there won't be any problem with duplicates being indexed. So all well and good.
Except.....Google has to crawl each of these parameter URLs to find the canonical. In a huge website this means that crawl budget is being consumed by unnecessary crawling of these parameterised URLs.
You can tell Google not to crawl the parameter URLs in search console (at least in the old version you can). But you can also stop Google crawling these URLS unnecessarily by blocking them in robots txt if you are sure that the parameters are not changing how the page is looking in search.
So long story short is that is why you may see that the URLS with parameters are being blocked in robots.txt. The canonical version URLS will be getting crawled just fine since they don't have any parameters and hence not being blocked.
Hope that makes sense?
-
Yes, it's in the robot.txt, that's the problem. Someone had to physically put it in there, but I've no idea why they would.
-
Did you check your robot txt file? Or check if any plugin creating this problem.
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
-
Should i be using shortcodes for my my page content.
Hello, I have a question. Sorry if this is been answered before. Recently I decided to do a little face lift to my main website pages. I wanted to make my testimonials more pretty. Found this great plugin for testimonials which creates shortcodes. I love how it looks like, but just realised that when I use images in shortcodes, these are not picked up by search engines 😞 only text is. Image search ability is pretty important for me and I'm not sure if I should stick with my plain design and upload images manually with all alt tags and title tags or there is a way to adjust shortcode so it shows images to search engines. You can see example here. https://a-fotografy.co.uk/maternity-photographer-edinburgh/ Let me know your thoughts guys. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy1 -
Block parent folder in robot.txt, but not children
Example: I want to block this URL (which shows up in Webmaster Tools as an error): http://www.siteurl.com/news/events-calendar/usa But not this: http://www.siteurl.com/news/events-calendar/usa/event-name
Web Design | | Zuken0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
Web Design | | jmueller0823
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much! Jim0 -
How to make sure category pages rank higher than product pages?
Hi, This question is E-Commerce related. We have product categories dividing products by color. Let's say we have the category 'blue toy cars' and a product called 'blue toy car racer', both of these could rank for the keyword 'blue toy car'. How do we make sure the category 'blue toy cars' ranks above the product 'blue toy car racer'? Or is the category page automatically ranked higher because of the higher page authority of that page? Alex
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0