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.
How to stop Search Bot from crawling through a submit button
-
On our website http://www.thefutureminders.com/, we have three form fields that have three pull downs for Month, Day, and year. This is creating duplicate pages while indexing. How do we tell the search Bot to index the page but not crawl through the submit button?
Thanks
Naren
-
Hi Dan
What is happening is this - since we have all the months [12], all the dates [31] and years[1921 through 2011] in the form fields, the robot seems to be taking these incrementally and then using the submit button. After the submit button, user is presented with a registration page. While we do want the search to index the rest of the page and the crawl through the rest of the page links we do not want it to crawl through that submit button. I hope I am making sense.
Naren
-
The advantage of blocking a page from being indexed via a meta tag is it is less likely to have unexpected consequences. I've often seen in the past cases where an incorrectly modified robots.txt file leads to a site being blocked by accident.
-
Hi
To my knowledge, you don't stop it from crawling through the button (like a nofollowed link), rather you block the robot at the page it ends up on after clicking submit.
Say the user hits submit and it takes them to mydomain.com/confirm.html On that page you'll want to add;
....if you want it to NOT index the page but follow the links on it.
or
...if you want it to NOT index and NOT follow the links on that page.
Its advised that its better to do this with the meta tag than in robots.txt.
Hopefully I've understood the question correctly!
-Dan
-
Block the pages/folders you do not wish to be indexed with robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /folder1/ Disallow: /folder2/
OR you can add canonical tags to the other pages which are creating duplicate content.
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
-
Any crawl issues with TLS 1.3?
Not a techie here...maybe this is to be expected, but ever since one of my client sites has switched to TLS 1.3, I've had a couple of crawl issues and other hiccups. First, I noticed that I can't use HTTPSTATUS.io any more...it renders an error message for URLs on the site in question. I wrote to their support desk and they said they haven't updated to 1.3 yet. Bummer, because I loved httpstatus.io's functionality, esp. getting bulk reports. Also, my Moz campaign crawls were failing. We are setting up a robots.txt directive to allow rogerbot (and the other bot), and will see if that works. These fails are consistent with the date we switched to 1.3, and some testing confirmed it. Anyone else seeing these types of issues, and can suggest any workarounds, solves, hacks to make my life easier? (including an alternative to httpstatus.io...I have and use screaming frog...not as slick, I'm afraid!) Do you think there was a configuration error with the client's TLS 1.3 upgrade, or maybe they're using a problematic/older version of 1.3?? Thanks -
Technical SEO | | TimDickey0 -
Why does Bing bot crawl so aggressively?
We observer that the Bing bot is crawling our site very aggressively. We set Bing's crawl control so that it should not crawl us during heavy traffic hours, but that did not change a thing. Does anyone have the problem and even better a solution?
Technical SEO | | Roverandom1 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
How to avoid instead suggestion from Google search results ?
Hi, When I search for "Zotey" in google, the following message is being displayed. Showing results for zotye
Technical SEO | | segistics
Search instead for zotey Anyone let me know how to get rid of this conflict asap? Regards, Sivakumar.0 -
Should a sub domain be a separate property in the Search Console?
We're launching a blog on a sub-domain of a corp site (blog.corpsite.com). We already have corpsite.com set up in the Search Console. Should I set up a separate property for this sub-domain in the Search Console (WMT) in order to manage it? Is it necessary? Thanks, JM
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
How does Google Crawl Multi-Regional Sites?
I've been reading up on this on Webmaster Tools but just wanted to see if anyone could explain it a bit better. I have a website which is going live soon which is going to be set up to redirect to a localised URL based on the IP address i.e. NZ IP ranges will go to .co.nz, Aus IP addresses would go to .com.au and then USA or other non-specified IP addresses will go to the .com address. There is a single CMS installation for the website. Does this impact the way in which Google is able to search the site? Will all domains be crawled or just one? Any help would be great - thanks!
Technical SEO | | lemonz0 -
Does Google Bot accept Cookies
I am working with a per page results refinement that stores a cookie on the users computer and then keeps that same per page as the user goes around the site. I was just wondering if that was true for Google bot or Bing bot as well. Will they keep the cookie or would they not be able to accept it. I just want to know as I dont want different urls created if they can keep the cookie. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0