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.
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
-
Hi!
I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us.
The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx
I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /community/photos/
Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible?
Thanks!
Leona
-
Are you seeing the images getting indexed, though? Even if GWT recognize the Robots.txt directives, blocking the pages may essentially keep the images from having any ranking value. Like Matt, I'm not sure this will work in practice.
Another option would be to create an alternate path to just the images, like an HTML sitemap with just links to those images and decent anchor text. The ranking power still wouldn't be great (you'd have a lot of links on this page, most likely), but it would at least kick the crawlers a bit.
-
Thanks Matt for your time and assistance! Leona
-
Hi Leona - what you have done is something along the lines of what I thought would work for you - sorry if I wasn't clear in my original response - I thought you meant if you created a robots.txt and specified Googlebot to be disallowed then Googlebot-image would pick up the photos still and as I said this wouldn't be the case as it Googlebot-image will follow what it set out for Googlebot unless you specify otherwise using the allow directive as I mentioned. Glad it has worked for you - keep us posted on your results.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your feedback!
It is not my belief that Googlebot overwrides googlebot-images otherwise specifying something for a specific bot of Google's wouldn't work, correct?
I setup the following:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /community/photos/
User-agent: googlebot-Image
Allow: /community/photos/
I tested the results in Google Webmaster Tools which indicated:
Googlebot: Blocked by line 26: Disallow: /community/photos/Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
Googlebot-Image: Allowed by line 29: Allow: /community/photos/Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
Thanks for your help!
Leona
-
Hi Leona
Googlebot-image and any of the other bots that Google uses follow the rules set out for Googlebot so blocking Googlebot would block your images as it overrides Googlebot-image. I don't think that there is a way around this using the disallow directive as you are blocking the directory which contains your images so they won't be indexed using specific images.
Something you may want to consider is the Allow directive -
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/~username~/
that is if Google is already indexing images under the username path?
The allow directive will only be successful if it contains more or equal number of characters as the disallow path, so bare in mind that if you had the following;
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/
the allow will win out and nothing will be blocked. please note that i haven't actioned the allow directive myself but looked into it in depth when i studied the robots.txt for my own sites it would be good if someone else had an experience of this directive. Hope this helps.
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
-
Robots.txt blocked internal resources Wordpress
Hi all, We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted. I've created the following new one: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 26, 2019, 5:09 AM | Mat_C
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php However, in the site audit on SemRush, I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts. Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO? Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index? Thanks for your thoughts!2 -
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 30, 2019, 2:37 PM | Vitzz1 -
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 5, 2019, 12:51 PM | JaredBroussard1 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 3, 2014, 6:04 PM | khi50 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 5, 2013, 3:00 PM | SharieBags0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 25, 2014, 8:10 AM | SEOMG1 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 3:18 PM | Peter2640 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 14, 2011, 3:44 AM | EricPacifico0