Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
-
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages.
So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
-
If you block the pages from being crawled, you are also telling the search engines to not index the pages (they don't want to include something they haven't looked at). So yes, the traffic numbers from organic search will change if you block the pages in robots.txt.
-
Agreed, that is a better solution, but, I am still wondering if you block something with robots.txt, will that lead to a decrease in traffic? What if we have some duplicate content that is highly trafficked, if we block it with robots.txt, will the traffic numbers change?
-
You certainly don't want to block this content!
One thing I'd consider is the if-modified-since header, or other headers. Here are two articles that explain more about the concept of using headers to tell the search engines " this hasn't changed, don't bother crawling it". I haven't personally used this, but have read about it in many places.
http://www.feedthebot.com/ifmodified.html
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-improve-crawl-efficiency-with-cache-control-headers-88824
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Block session id URLs with robots.txt
Hi, I would like to block all URLs with the parameter '?filter=' from being crawled by including them in the robots.txt. Which directive should I use: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Disallow: ?filter= or User-agent: *
Disallow: /?filter= In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary? Thanks!1 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Why isn't my uneven link flow among index pages causing uneven search traffic?
I'm working with a site that has millions of pages. The link flow through index pages is atrocious, such that for the letter A (for example) the index page A/1.html has a page authority of 25 and the next pages drop until A/70.html (the last index page listing pages that start with A) has a page authority of just 1. However, the pages linked to from the low page authority index pages (that is, the pages whose second letter is at the end of the alphabet) get just as much traffic as the pages linked to from A/1.html (the pages whose second letter is A or B). The site gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of pages, so this is not just a statistical biip. The evidence is overwhelming that the pages from the low authority index pages are getting just as much traffic as those getting traffic from the high authority index pages. Why is this? Should I "fix" the bad link flow problem if traffic patterns indicate there's no problem? Is this hurting me in some other way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GilReich0 -
Emergency duplicate of website due to DNS failure - how to minimise loss of search engine traffic?
Hi, Our client has had a disaster with their domain name registrar, where the DNS settings have been reset and it looks like the registrar won't be able to re-instate the DNS settings for four days time. This is a nightmare for lost business whilst the site and emails are offline. As a fallback, we've setup a copy of the client's website at an alternative domain name so that people can be directed there in the meantime via Facebook posts, etc. Is there anything you would recommend we do in the meantime to minimise the loss of traffic from search engines, and loss of reputation with Google? eg. using Google webmasters to tell Google about the change of address? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smaavie0 -
Amount of pages indexed for classified (number of pages for the same query)
I've notice that classified usually has a lots of pages indexed and that's because for each query/kw they index the first 100 results pages, normally they have 10 results per page. As an example imagine the site www.classified.com, for the query/kw "house for rent new york" there is the page www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york and the "index" is set for the first 100 SERP pages, so www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-1 www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-2 ...and so on. Wouldn't it better to index only the 1st result page? I mean in the first 100 pages lots of ads are very similar so why should Google be happy by indexing lots of similar pages? Could Google penalyze this behaviour? What's your suggestions? Many tahnks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuroa-2467120 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0