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
-
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 -
Why is robots.txt blocking URL's in sitemap?
Hi Folks, Any ideas why Google Webmaster Tools is indicating that my robots.txt is blocking URL's linked in my sitemap.xml, when in fact it isn't? I have checked the current robots.txt declarations and they are fine and I've also tested it in the 'robots.txt Tester' tool, which indicates for the URL's it's suggesting are blocked in the sitemap, in fact work fine. Is this a temporary issue that will be resolved over a few days or should I be concerned. I have recently removed the declaration from the robots.txt that would have been blocking them and then uploaded a new updated sitemap.xml. I'm assuming this issue is due to some sort of crossover. Thanks Gaz
Technical SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
301 Redirect keep html files on server?
Hello just one quick question which came up in the discussion here: http://moz.com/community/q/take-a-good-amount-of-existing-landing-pages-offline-because-of-low-traffic-cannibalism-and-thin-content When I do 301 redirects where I put together content from 2 pages, should I keep the page/html which redirects on the server? Or should I delete? Or does it make no difference at all?
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Submitting a new sitemap index file. Only one file is getting read. What is the error?
Hi community, I am working to submit a new a new sitemap index files, where about 5 50,000 sku files will be uploaded. Webmasters is reporting that only 50k skus have been submitted. Google Webmasters is accepting the index, however only the first file is getting read. I have 2 errors and need to know if this is the reason that the multiple files are not getting uploaded. Errors: | 1 | | Warnings | Invalid XML: too many tags | Too many tags describing this tag. Please fix it and resubmi | | 2 | | Warnings | Incorrect namespace | Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace. | 1 | Here is the url I am submitting: http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-sitemap-index.xml | 1 | | | | |
Technical SEO | | mm9161570 -
Magento Robots & overly dynamic URL-s
How can i block all URL-s on a Magento store that have 2 or more dynamic parameters in it, since all the parameters have attribute name in it and not some uniform ID Would something like: Disallow: /?&* work? Since the only thing that is constant throughout all the custom parameters is that they are separated with "&" Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
.htacess file format for Apache Server
Hi, My website having canonical issue for home page, I have written the .htaccess file and upload the root directory. But still I didn't see any changes in the home page. I am copying syntax which one I have written in the .htaccess file. Please review the syntax and let me know the changes. Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on #RewriteBase / re-direct index.htm to root / ### RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L] re-direct IP address to www ### re-direct non-www to www ### re-direct any parked domain to www of main domain RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.metricstream.com$ [nc] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.metricstream.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L] Is there any specific htaccess file format for apache server? Thanks, Karthik
Technical SEO | | karthik-1755440