Robot.txt pattern matching
-
Hola fellow SEO peoples!
Site: http://www.sierratradingpost.com
robot: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/robots.txt
Please see the following line: Disallow: /keycodebypid~*
We are trying to block URLs like this:
http://www.sierratradingpost.com/keycodebypid~8855/for-the-home~d~3/kitchen~d~24/
but we still find them in the Google index.
1. we are not sure if we need to specify the robot to use pattern matching.
2. we are not sure if the format is correct. Should we use Disallow: /keycodebypid*/ or /*keycodebypid/ or even /*keycodebypid~/?
What is even more confusing is that the meta robot command line says "noindex" - yet they still show up. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />
Thank you!
-
ok, so not sure sure this was shared. Matt Cutts talking on this same subject.
| | <cite class="kvm">www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2giR-WKUfY</cite> |
-
John, The article was a real eye-opener!Thanks again!
-
Somehow Google is finding these pages, but you're disallowing the Googlebot from reading the page, so it doesn't know anything about the meta noindex tag on the page. If you have meta noindex tags on all of these pages, you can remove that line in your robots.txt preventing bots from reading these pages, and as Google crawls these pages, they should remove them from their SERPs.
-
Great point! I will remember that. However I have both the disallow line in the robots.txt file and I also have the noindex meta command. Yet Google shows 3000 of them!?!?!?!
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.sierratradingpost.com+keycodebypid
-
Well done John!!!
-
Hi,
then you have the robots.txt and the meta tag. I think its better the metatag (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt)
Have you WebMaster Tools in your web? you can test your robots.txt file (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449)
-
Here's a good SEOMoz post about this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts. What's most likely happening is that the disallow in robots.txt is preventing the bots from indexing the page, so they're not going to find the meta noindex tag. If people link to one of these pages externally, the disallow in robots.txt does not prevent the page from appearing in search results.
The robots.txt syntax you're using now looks correct to me for what you're trying to do.
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
-
Utilizing one robots.txt for two sites
I have two sites that are facilitated hosting in similar CMS. Maybe than having two separate robots.txt records (one for every space), my web office has made one which records the sitemaps for the two sites, similar to this:
Technical SEO | | eulabrant0 -
Little confused regarding robots.txt
Hi there Mozzers! As a newbie, I have a question that what could happen if I write my robots.txt file like this... User-agent: * Allow: / Disallow: /abc-1/ Disallow: /bcd/ Disallow: /agd1/ User-agent: * Disallow: / Hope to hear from you...
Technical SEO | | DenorL0 -
Log in, sign up, user registration and robots
Hi all, We have an accommodation site that asks users only to register when they want to book a room, in the last step. Though this is the ideal situation when you have tons of users, nowadays we are having around 1500 - 2000 per day and making tests we found out that if we ask for a registration (simple, 1 click FB) we mail them all and through a good customer service we are increasing our sales. That is why, we would like to ask users to register right after the home page ie Home/accommodation or and all the rest. I am not sure how can I make to make that content still visible to robots.
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
Will the authentication process block google crawling it? Maybe something we can do? We are not completely sure how to proceed so any tip would be appreciated. Thank you all for answering.3 -
Robots.txt
I have a client who after designer added a robots.txt file has experience continual growth of urls blocked by robots,tx but now urls blocked (1700 aprox urls) has surpassed those indexed (1000). Surely that would mean all current urls are blocked (plus some extra mysterious ones). However pages still listing in Google and traffic being generated from organic search so doesnt look like this is the case apart from the rather alarming webmaster tools report any ideas whats going on here ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Blocked by robots
my client GWT has a number of notices for "blocked by meta-robots" - these are all either blog posts/categories/or tags his former seo told him this: "We've activated following settings: Use noindex for Categories Use noindex for Archives Use noindex for Tag Archives to reduce keyword stuffing & duplicate post tags
Technical SEO | | Ezpro9
Disabling all 3 noindex settings above may remove google blocks but also will send too many similar tags, post archives/category. " is this guy correct? what would be the problem with indexing these? am i correct in thinking they should be indexed? thanks0 -
Restricted by robots.txt and soft bounce issues (related).
In our web master tools we have 35K (ish) URLs that are restricted by robots.txt and as have 1200(ish) soft 404s. WE can't seem to figure out how to properly resolve these URLs so that they no longer show up this way. Our traffic from SEO has taken a major hit over the last 2 weeks because of this. Any help? Thanks, Libby
Technical SEO | | GristMarketing0