Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for Filter Search result pages--Why?
-
Hi,
We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks.
Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see.
http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132
Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /.js$
Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /utm
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Sitemap: -
Thanks Keri for your advice
-
Thanks Rick for your advice
-
Like Rick said, it's just a "hey, make sure that you really wanted to do this" type warning, since you can easily write a robots.txt that blocks things you didn't really think would be blocked. Or someone else can modify the robots.txt without telling you, and this can be a warning that you need to go find someone and get that fixed.
-
So what your saying is:
1. SEOmoz says these pages can't get indexed by search engines because of our robot.txt
2. We don't want these pages indexed and blocked them using robots.txt
My initial reaction is: no problem, SEOmoz is just showing you as a 'confirmation warning' that these pages are not indexed, but since you did that on purpose, it's okay.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Brushing up on my SEO skills - how do I check my website to see if Javascript is blocking search engines from crawling the links within a javascript-enabled drop down menu?
I set my user agent in my Chrome browser to Googlebot and I disable javascript within my Chrome settings, but then what?
Technical SEO | | MagnitudeSEO0 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Robots.txt anomaly
Hi, I'm monitoring a site thats had a new design relaunch and new robots.txt added. Over the period of a week (since launch) webmaster tools has shown a steadily increasing number of blocked urls (now at 14). In the robots.txt file though theres only 12 lines with the disallow command, could this be occurring because a line in the command could refer to more than one page/url ? They all look like single urls for example: Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes etc, etc And is it normal for webmaster tools reporting of robots.txt blocked urls to steadily increase in number over time, as opposed to being identified straight away ? Thanks in advance for any help/advice/clarity why this may be happening ? Cheers Dan0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Is there a reason to set a crawl-delay in the robots.txt?
I've recently encountered a site that has set a crawl-delay command set in their robots.txt file. I've never seen a need for this to be set since you can set that in Google Webmaster Tools for Googlebot. They have this command set for all crawlers, which seems odd to me. What are some reasons that someone would want to set it like that? I can't find any good information on it when researching.
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Why am i still getting duplicate page title warnings after implementing canonical URLS?
Hi there, i'm having some trouble understanding why I'm still getting duplicate page title warnings on pages that have the rel=canonical attribute. For example: this page is the relative url http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/1 and http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/2 is the second page of this parsed list which is linking back to the first page using rel=canonical. i have over 300 pages like this!! what should i do SEOmoz GURUS? how do i remedy this problem? is it a problem?
Technical SEO | | fourthdimensioninc0 -
Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?
I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Xopie0 -
Can Search engines crawl this page
Hi guys, To put a long story short we have had to make a copy of our site and put it on another domain so in essence there are 2 copies of our site on the web.What we have done is put a username and password on the homepage - http://www.ughhwiki.co.uk/ now i just want to be 100% sure that the search engines cannot crawl this? Thank you Jon
Technical SEO | | imrubbish0