Temporarily suspend Googlebot without blocking users
-
We'll soon be launching a redesign, on a new platform, migrating millions of pages to new URLs.
How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site? We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture.
GWT's recommendation is to 503 all pages - including robots.txt, but that also makes the site invisible to real site visitors, resulting in significant business loss. Bad answer.
I've heard some recommendations to disallow all user agents in robots.txt. Any answer that puts the millions of pages we already have indexed at risk is also a bad answer.
Thanks
-
So it seems like we've gone full circle.
The initial question was, "How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site? We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture."
Sounds like the answer is, 'that's not possible'.
-
Putting a noindex/nofollow on an index url will remove it from SERPs, although some ulrs will still show for direct search (using the url itself as a KW) but even then they will appear as clear links without any TItle/Description details.
Using a 301 redirect will remove the old page from index, regardless of noindex/nofollow.
If you are using a noindex/nofollow for the new url - both will not show.
-
Thank you, Ruth!
Can I ask a clarifying question?
If I put a noindex/nofollow on the new urls, wouldn't the result be the same as if I put noindex/nofollow on the indexed urls? There is only one instance of each page - and all of the millions of indexed URLs will be redirecting to new urls.
Here is my assumption: if I put noindex/nofollow on the new urls - a search bot will crawl the old url, follow the redirect to the new url, detect the noindex/nofollow, and then drop the old, indexed url from their index. Is that the wrong assumption?
-
I would use robots.txt to noindex the whole website as well - but just the new pages, not the old ones. Then when you're ready to be crawled, remove the robots.txt entry and Fetch as Googlebot to get re-crawled. You may fall out of the index for a day or two but should quickly be re-indexed.
Another solution would be to use the meta robots tag to individually noindex each page (if there's a way to do that in your CMS, obviously adding them by hand wouldn't be scalable), and then remove. That may increase your chances of getting re-crawled and re-indexed sooner.
-
Thanks for the response, Mark.
It sounds as if you tried this on a few new pages.
I'm talking about millions of existing pages.
Would you robots.txt noindex your entire website? Seems like you'd run a huge risk of being dumped from the index entirely.
-
I recommend robots text noindex, nofollow.
That way people can still see the pages they just aren't indexed in Google yet.
As we developed some new pages on one of our sites we did this and we could still view pages and send folks there that we wanted to see the content for feedback - but no one else knew they were there.
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
-
Does user engagement or content of pages requiring login help SEO?
Hi! Our company is trying to come up with a few pages with some manuals to teach our users how to use our products. However, these pages require username and password. My understanding is that user engagement will help a website's keyword rankings and Google will not be able to crawl or have access to pages requiring login as it doesn't have username and password. Based on that idea, does that mean all the content and user engagement on those pages requiring login won't help our overall SEO? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | EverettChen0 -
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | semcheck11 -
Canonicalize or Block?
Hi Mozers, We have staff profile pages w/ one main URL and then URLs with query parameters and jump links to take you to different parts of the page. The longer URLs with parameters canonicalize to the main pages but should they also be nonidexed? Thanks, Yael
Technical SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Redirect of https:// to http:// without SSL. Possible or not?!
Good afternoon, smart dudes : ) I am here to ask for your help. I posted this question on google help forum and stackoverflow, but looks like people do not know the correct answer... QUESTION: We used to have a secured site, but recently purchased a separate reservation software that provides SSL (takes clients to a separate secured website) where they can fill out the reservation form. We cancelled our SSL (just think its a waste to pay $100 for securing plain text). Now i have so many links pointing to our secured site and i have no idea how to fix it! How do i redirect https://www.mysite.comto http://www.mysite.com.Also would like to mention that i already have redirect from non www to www domain (not sure if that matters): RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]As i already mentioned....we do not have SSL!!!! None of those 301 redirect codes i found online work (you have to have SSL for the site to be redirected from https to http | currently i get an error - can't establish a secured connection to the server ). Is there anything i can do???? Or do i have to purchase SSL again?
Technical SEO | | JennaD140 -
Noindex user profile
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions: What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive? When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity) (unique) Profile picture (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site. Embedded Google Map Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thomasvanderkleij0 -
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
Hello all, We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site. I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool. Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method? Would appreciate anyone's immediate response. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin. Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this? Here's original message Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure. If the site error rate is less than 100%: Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Do user metrics really mean anything?
This is a serious question, I'd also like some advice on my experience so far with the Panda. One of my websites, http://goo.gl/tFBA4 was hit on January 19th, it wasn't a massive hit, but took us from 25,000 to 21,000 uniques per day. It survived Panda completely prior. The only thing that had changed, was an upgrade in the CMS, which caused a lot of duplicate content, i.e 56 copies of the homepage, under various URLs. These were all indexed in Google. I've heard varying views, as to whether this could trigger Panda, I believe so, but i'd appreciate your thoughts on it. There was also the above the fold update on the 19th, but we have 1 ad MAX on each page, most pages have none. I hate even having to have 1 ad. I think we can safely assume it was Panda that did the damage. Jan 18th was the first Panda refresh, since we upgraded our CMS in mid-late December. As it was nothing more than a refresh, I feel it's safe to assume, that the website was hit, due to something that had changed on the website, between the Jan 18th refresh and the one previous. So, aside from fixing the bugs in the CMS, I felt now was a good time to put a massive focus on user metrics, I worked hard and continuing to spend a lot of time, improving them. Reduced bounce rate from 50% to 30% (extremely low in the niche) Average page views from 7 to 12 Average time on site from 5 to almost 8 minutes Plus created a mobile optimised version of the site Page loading speeds slashed. Not only did the above improvements have no positive effect, traffic continued to slide and we're now close to a massive 40% loss. Btw I realise neither mobile site nor page loading speeds are user metrics. I fully appreciate that my website is image heavy and thin on text, but that is an industry wide 'issue'. It's not an issue to my users, so it shouldn't be an issue to Google. Unlike our competitors, we actively encourage our users to add descriptions to their content and provide guidelines, to assit them in doing so. We have a strong relationship with our artists, as we listen to their needs and develop the website accordingly. Most of the results in the SERPs, contain content taken from my website, without my permission or permission of the artist. Rarely do they give any credit. If user metrics are so important, why on earth has my traffic continued to slide? Do you have any advice for me, on how I can further improve my chances of recovering from this? Fortunately, despite my artists download numbers being slashed in half, they've stuck by me and the website, which speaks volumes.
Technical SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0