Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Should search pages be disallowed in robots.txt?

Technical SEO

758

MichaelWeisbaum last edited by

The SEOmoz crawler picks up "search" pages on a site as having duplicate page titles, which of course they do. Does that mean I should put a "Disallow: /search" tag in my robots.txt? When I put the URL's into Google, they aren't coming up in any SERPS, so I would assume everything's ok. I try to abide by the SEOmoz crawl errors as much as possible, that's why I'm asking. Any thoughts would be helpful.

Thanks!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
MichaelWeisbaum @Kotkov last edited by

Using Google and I'm entering the exact URL in the search. No results are found. I know this means it's not indexed, but why does the SEOmoz crawler pick it up?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Kotkov last edited by

What engine are you running and what is the exact url you see when you perform search?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues

A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?
Technical SEO | | lauralou82

0
Sitelinks only show when the URL is searched- Why don't they show when our company name is searched?

Why is is that when I search "protonmail.ch", sitelinks show for our company. However when you search for "ProtonMail", no sitelinks show, even though our homepage is now on the top result. We've been trying different things to improve the navigational structure of the homepage, such as using the <nav>tag. If you have any thoughts on why sitelinks might not be showing up, we'd really appreciate it! Thank you </nav>
Technical SEO | | kevinzh

0
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?

My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor

0
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps

Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission

0
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page

Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank

1
Confused about robots.txt

There is a lot of conflicting and/or unclear information about robots.txt out there. Somehow, I can't make out what's the best way to use robots even after visiting the official robots website. For example I have the following format for my robots. User-agent: * Disallow: javascript.js Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /embedconfig Disallow: /playerconfig Disallow: /spotlightmedia Disallow: /EventVideos Disallow: /playEpisode Allow: / Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex-videos.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/news-sitemap.xml Is this correct and/or recommended? If so, then how come I see a list of over 200 or so links blocked by robots when Im checking out Google Webmaster Tools! Help someone, anyone! Can't seem to understand this robotic business! Regards,
Technical SEO | | Netpace

0
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?

When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson

0
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 | | imrubbish

0