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.
Does Bing ignore robots txt files?
-
Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk
Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site
http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google?
Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below.
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg
Any insights welcome
-
Thanks Clever PHD - we are now adding your recommendations to our preview sites
-
I know this does not sound related, but Matt Cutts explains this same situation on Google. It is probably the same reasoning for Bing.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/
Looking at your screen shot, it looks as if all that is being shown in Bing is just the URL, no title tag, description, no other information.
What Matt says is that they did not technically crawl the url, but they are aware that it exists. Example, there is another page linking to it with related content or the anchor tag on the link relates to the keyword search you are performing.
You are searching for the URL specifically and so it makes sense that they would show the URL as it relates to that search, but they are not showing any information from the page as they do not have it as they did not spider it, again, they are just aware of the URL. Kind of like talking to a lawyer eh?
If you search for any other keywords does this excluded site show up? Probably not. If the do, then they are probably only showing the URL like in the example above.
The video has more details. Here are the solutions he gives, I will outline them as well
-
Use the Bing URL removal tool - bing bang boom. Done.
-
(my new favorite) Let the page / site be indexed but then show an noindex nofollow meta tag on the page / site. There is a subtle but important difference in the meta tag vs the robot.txt file. The spiders have to be able to crawl the page to be able to see what they are supposed to do with it.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it."
The thing is, if you have a robots.txt file that says don't crawl the site, then the spider never gets to the noindex meta tag to know to delete the page from the index. It sounds a little backwards, but when the page is already in the search index, you have to let the spider crawl it to then see the noindex tag so that the search engine will know to remove it from the index.
Here is what you can do as this seems to only be an issue with Bing and just with the home page. Open up the robots.txt to allow Bing to crawl the site. Restrict the crawling to the home page only and exclude all the other pages from the crawl.
On the home page that you allow Bing to crawl, add the noindex no follow meta tag and you should be set.
All of that said. If you have a single URL listed in bing with no meta data, it may not be worth all the above effort as you are not ranking for any valuable key words, but that is your call
It is always interesting to see how the spiders and engines think so I wanted to pass this along.
Cheers!
PS - If you have a ton of pages like this - then you just would allow Bing to crawl them all and add the noindex nofollow tag to all of them.
-
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
-
Htaccess file help
Hi, thanks for looking i am trying (and failing) to write a htaccess for the following scenario <colgroup><col width="679"></colgroup> http://www.gardening-services-edinburgh.com/index.html http://www.gardening-services-edinburgh.com http://www.gardening-services-edinburgh.com/ | so that all of these destinations goto the one resource any ideas? thanks andy
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
What are the negative implications of listing URLs in a sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt?
In running a crawl of a client's site I can see several URLs listed in the sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt file. Other than perhaps using up crawl budget, are there any other negative implications?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Log files vs. GWT: major discrepancy in number of pages crawled
Following up on this post, I did a pretty deep dive on our log files using Web Log Explorer. Several things have come to light, but one of the issues I've spotted is the vast difference between the number of pages crawled by the Googlebot according to our log files versus the number of pages indexed in GWT. Consider: Number of pages crawled per log files: 2993 Crawl frequency (i.e. number of times those pages were crawled): 61438 Number of pages indexed by GWT: 17,182,818 (yes, that's right - more than 17 million pages) We have a bunch of XML sitemaps (around 350) that are linked on the main sitemap.xml page; these pages have been crawled fairly frequently, and I think this is where a lot of links have been indexed. Even so, would that explain why we have relatively few pages crawled according to the logs but so many more indexed by Google?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Does bing accept meta name="fragment" for AJAX crawling?
I have a case in which the whole site is AJAX, the method to appease to crawlers used is <meta< span="">name="fragment" content="!"> Which is the new HTML5 PushState that Bing said it supports (At least I think it is that) This approach works for Google, but Bing isn't showing anything. Does anyone know if Bing supports this and we have to alter something or if not is there a known work around? The only other logic we have is to recognize the bing user agent and redirect to the rendered page, but we were worried that could cause some kind of cloaking penalty</meta<>
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Can't find mistake in robots.txt
Hi all, we recently filled our robots.txt file to prevent some directories from crawling. Looks like: User-agent: * Disallow: /Views/ Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /routing/ Disallow: /Profiler/ Disallow: /LILLYPROFILER/ Disallow: /EventRweKompaktProfiler/ Disallow: /AccessIntProfiler/ Disallow: /KellyIntProfiler/ Disallow: /lilly/ now, as Google Webmaster Tools hasn't updated our robots.txt yet, I checked our robots.txt in some ckeckers. They tell me that the User agent: * contains an error. **Example:** **Line 1: Syntax error! Expected <field>:</field> <value></value> 1: User-agent: *** **`I checked other robots.txt written the same way --> they work,`** accordign to the checkers... **`Where the .... is the mistake???`** ```
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
Track PDF files downloaded from my site
I came across this code for tracking PDF files [1. map.pdf ( name of PDF file ) and files is the folder name. Am i right ? 2. What shall i be able to track using the code given above ? a ) No. of clicks on links or how many persons downloaded the PDF files ? 3. Where in Google this report will be visible ? Thanks a lot.](http://www.example.com/files/map.pdf)
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Getting more pages indexed by yahoo and bing
Anyone has a reliable way to get more pages indexed in yahoo and bing. Please dont say to get more inner page quality links.
Technical SEO | | mickey110