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.
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
-
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls.
So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*?
To prevent the price faceted url from being cached:
/category.html?price=1%2C1000
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88Thanks!
-
If you can no-index , follow all but the default, then you will send link juice to the pages but it will return the link juice because it is follow, but they will not index because they are no-index.
If you use robots, then it can not read the page to follow the links.
-
Hey Tyler! haven't seen you on SEOmoz in a while. Hope you are good!
Check to see if this would make sense for you. GWT > Site Configuration > URL Perameters. It says "Only use this feature if you feel confident about how parameters work for your site. Telling Googlebot to exclude URLs with certain parameters could result in large numbers of your pages disappearing from our index."
-
If I can, then I disallow hundreds of pages that are duplicate content and should not be crawled.
If I don't then I send link juice to urls that I don't want seen.
This is a good answer though, thanks. Any other thoughts?
-
You can, but then you have links passing link juice to non followed pages. it would be better if you used canonical. even better would be to add no-index, follow meta tag when non canonical page is displayed, but this requres some codeing.
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
-
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site
Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png
Technical SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Adding multi-language sitemaps to robots.txt
I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento. Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language. The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts. They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as: /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it. Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language: /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0
