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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Bing Indexation and handling of X-ROBOTS tag or AngularJS
Hi MozCommunity, I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why BING wont index a test site we're running. We're in the midst of upgrading one of our sites from archaic technology and infrastructure to a fully responsive version.
Web Design | | AU-SEO
This new site is a fully AngularJS driven site. There's currently over 2 million pages and as we're developing the new site in the backend, we would like to test out the tech with Google and Bing. We're looking at a pre-render option to be able to create static HTML snapshots of the pages that we care about the most and will be available on the sitemap.xml.gz However, with 3 completely static HTML control pages established, where we had a page with no robots metatag on the page, one with the robots NOINDEX metatag in the head section and one with a dynamic header (X-ROBOTS meta) on a third page with the NOINDEX directive as well. We expected the one without the meta tag to at least get indexed along with the homepage of the test site. In addition to those 3 control pages, we had 3 pages where we had an internal search results page with the dynamic NOINDEX header. A listing page with no such header and the homepage with no such header. With Google, the correct indexation occured with only 3 pages being indexed, being the homepage, the listing page and the control page without the metatag. However, with BING, there's nothing. No page indexed at all. Not even the flat static HTML page without any robots directive. I have a valid sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt directive open to all engines across all pages yet, nothing. I used the fetch as Bingbot tool, the SEO analyzer Tool and the Preview Page Tool within Bing Webmaster Tools, and they all show a preview of the requested pages. Including the ones with the dynamic header asking it not to index those pages. I'm stumped. I don't know what to do next to understand if BING can accurately process dynamic headers or AngularJS content. Upon checking BWT, there's definitely been crawl activity since it marked against the XML sitemap as successful and put a 4 next to the number of crawled pages. Still no result when running a site: command though. Google responded perfectly and understood exactly which pages to index and crawl. Anyone else used dynamic headers or AngularJS that might be able to chime in perhaps with running similar tests? Thanks in advance for your assistance....0 -
Body of text on category pages
Hello everyone, wonder if I can pick your brains about our company's website. We are a tea company - Canton Tea Co. We have been advised that it is really important to get more text onto the category pages on our website, as otherwise the page just consists of a list of products, and therefore provides Google with a ton of headers, tiny descriptions, and not enough text to allow the page to being easily indexed, therefore hurting our Google ranking for key search terms like 'Green Tea' which should lead to the Green Tea category page. So we decided to add some text to the category page. The only place for this text to go was laid over the category header image. However, it looks pretty awful and unsophisticated having this text on top of the image - please see an example, our Green Tea category page, via this link: http://www.cantonteaco.com/loose-leaf-tea-1/type/green-tea.html So I have three questions: How significant is the text on a category page such as this to that page's Google ranking? If we moved the text to an area that was hidden until clicked on, for example the 'Filter by' section that opens up when you click on it (see via URL above), would that negate the SEO benefit? Do you have any other ideas or opinions on how to resolve this? Thank you! Louise, Canton Tea Co.
Web Design | | Cantonteaco0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
E-Commerce Website Architecture - Cannibalization between Product Categories and Blog Categories?
Hi, I have an e-commerce site that sells laptops. My main landing pages and category pages are as follows:
Web Design | | BeytzNet
"Toshiba Laptops", "Samsung Laptops", etc. We also run a WP blog with industry news.
The posts are divided into categories which are basically as our landing pages.
The posts themselves usually link to the appropriate e-commerce landing page.
For example: a post about a new Samsung Laptop which is categorized in the blog under "Samsung Laptops" will naturally link somewhere inside to the "samsung laptops" ecommerce landing page. Is that good or do the categories on the blog cannibalize my more important e-commerce section landing pages? Thanks0 -
Landing pages vs internal pages.
Hey everyone I have run into a problem and would greatly appreciate anyone that could weigh in on it. I have a web client that went to an outside vendor for marketing. The client asked me to help them target some keywords and since I am new to the SEO world I have proceeded by researching the best keywords for the client. I found 6 that see excellent monthly searches. I then registered the .com and or .net domain names that match these words. I then started building landing pages that make reference to the keyword and then have links to his site to get more info. My customer sent the first of these sites to the marketer and he says I am doing things all wrong. He says rather then having landing pages like this I should just point the domain names at internal pages to the website. He also says that I should not have different looks for the landing pages from the main site and that I should have the full site menu on each landing page. I wanted to here what everyone here has to say about the pros and cons of the way to do this cause the guy giving the advice to me has a lower ranking site then I do and I have only started working on getting my site ranked this year. He has atleast according to him been doing this forever. Thanks, Ron
Web Design | | bsofttech0