Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
-
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages).
Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
-
Me too. It was that video that helped to clear things up for me. Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag. It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.
-
Good stuff. I was always under the impression they still crawled them (otherwise, how would you know if the block was removed).
-
Take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
to see what I am talking about.
Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.
-
Robots.txt prevents indexation, not crawling. The good news is that Googlebot stops crawling 404s.
-
Just a couple of under the hood things to check.
-
Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.
-
This may be a timing issue. Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?
If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue. If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it found.
-
I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association. In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page. You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.
-
If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do. Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.
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"
Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors. Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index. It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Question spam malware causing many indexed pages
Hey Mozzers, I was speaking with a friend today about a site that he has been working on that was infected when he began working on it. Here (https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:themeliorist.ca) you can see that the site has 4400 indexed pages, but if you scroll down you will see some pages such as /pfizer-viagra-samples/ or /dapoxetine-kentucky/. All of these pages are returning 404 errors, and I ran it through SEO spider just to see if any of these pages would show up, and they don't. This is not an issue for a client, but I am just curious why these pages are still hanging around in the index. Maybe others have experience this issue too. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Why are these results being showed as blocked by robots.txt?
If you perform this search, you'll see all m. results are blocked by robots.txt: http://goo.gl/PRrlI, but when I reviewed the robots.txt file: http://goo.gl/Hly28, I didn't see anything specifying to block crawlers from these pages. Any ideas why these are showing as blocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
What content should I block in wodpress with robots.txt?
I need to know if anyone has tips on creating a good robots.txt. I have read a lot of info, but I am just not clear on what I should allow and not allow on wordpress. For example there are pages and posts, then attachments, wp-admin, wp-content and so on. Does anyone have a good robots.txt guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0 -
Block all but one URL in a directory using robots.txt?
Is it possible to block all but one URL with robots.txt? for example domain.com/subfolder/example.html, if we block the /subfolder/ directory we want all URLs except for the exact match url domain.com/subfolder to be blocked.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Do in page links pointing to the parent page make the page more relevant for that term?
Here's a technical question. Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones". I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term "cell phones". Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770