Moz "Crawl Diagnostics" doesn't respect robots.txt
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Hello, I've just had a new website crawled by the Moz bot. It's come back with thousands of errors saying things like:
- Duplicate content
- Overly dynamic URLs
- Duplicate Page Titles
The duplicate content & URLs it's found are all blocked in the robots.txt so why am I seeing these errors?
Here's an example of some of the robots.txt that blocks things like dynamic URLs and directories (which Moz bot ignored):Disallow: /?mode=
Disallow: /?limit=
Disallow: /?dir=
Disallow: /?p=*&
Disallow: /?SID=
Disallow: /reviews/
Disallow: /home/Many thanks for any info on this issue.
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Hi Si, has this issue been resolved?
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Hey Si,
Thanks for writing in. It doesn't seem that we are having an overarching issue with our crawler ignoring robots.txt files so I did some research in Google Webmaster Tools and it looks like most crawlers require an asterisk in the disallow directive to recognize that all pages of a dynamic URL are being disallowed. If you look in the "Pattern Matching" section of this resource here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449, that should give you more information about setting up the robots.txt with the correct disallow directives to block those pages.
If you add in the astrisk to the disallow directive and you are still seeing these pages crawled, it would help if you sent in an email with your campaign information to our support desk at help@moz.com so we can have our engineers look into this more directly.
I hope this helps.
Chiaryn
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If you have an "index,(no)follow" meta on those pages I think they will be crawled even though you have them blocked in robots.txt. So by adding "noindex" on those pages it might work as you want it to.
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Is the / actually in the URL at that spot? Or is your link like http://www.example.com/abcd?p=147
If you give an example full URL that includes one of your blocked dynamic URLs we can take a better look. If your robots is setup correctly, it shouldn't find that stuff but give us more info if you're able.
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