Is my robots.txt file working?
-
Greetings from medieval York UK
Everytime to you enter my name & Liz this page is returned in Google:
http://www.davidclick.com/web_page/al_liz.htmBut i have the following robots txt file which has been in place a few weeks
User-agent: * Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice_pre_wedding_photoshoot.htm Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice.htm Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice_copyright_free_wedding_photography.htm Disallow: /web_page/prices.htm Disallow: /web_page/about_me.htm Disallow: /web_page/thumbnails4.htm Disallow: /web_page/thumbnails.html Disallow: /web_page/al_liz.htm Disallow: /web_page/york_wedding_photographer_advice.htm Allow: /
So my question is please...
"Why is this page appearing in the SERPS when its blocked in the robots txt file e.g.: Disallow: /web_page/al_liz.htm"
ANy insights welcome
-
Glad we could help
Fredrik
PS Dont forget to mark as answered
-
Brill answers guys thanks
-
Nightwing
Frederick gives some good pointers and here is a little trick to try: Fetch as Google from GWMT
- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, under Health, click Fetch as Google.
- In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
- In the dropdown list, select the type of fetch you want. To see what our web crawler Googlebot sees, select Web. To see what our mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile sees, select cHTML (this is used mainly for Japanese web sites) or Mobile XHTML/WML.
- Click Fetch.
This will likely give you a quick re index and you will know whassup...
Best,
Robert
-
Hi David
How long have you had the robots.txt file? Preventeing Google from indexing the page would not automatically remove it if its already indexed. That would take some time.
You could try using the removal tool:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
If its urgent you could check the header and do a 301 redirect if the user comes from Google. But I think it should sort itself out within not too long.
Fredrik
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
-
Removing CSS & JS Files from Index
Hi, Google has indexed a few .CSS and .JS files that belong to our WordPress plugins and themes. I had them blocked via robots, but realized this doesn't prevent indexation (and can likely hurt us since Google wants to access these files). I've since removed the robots instructions, submitted a removal request via Search Console, but want to make sure they don't come back. Is there a way to put a noindex tag within .CSS and .JS files? Or should I do something with .htaccess instead?
Technical SEO | | kirmeliux1 -
Both links with ".html" and without are working , Is that a problem ?
Default format of my url ending with ".html" , I know it's not a problem .. But both links with ".html" and without are working , Is that critical problem or not ? and how to solve it ?
Technical SEO | | Mohamed_Samer0 -
Easy Question: regarding no index meta tag vs robot.txt
This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea? I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best. **DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them? If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right? ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option? **301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think? DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Robots.txt
Google Webmaster Tools say our website's have low-quality pages, so we have created a robots.txt file and listed all URL’s that we want to remove from Google index. Is this enough for the solve problem?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Question about construction of our sitemap URL in robots.txt file
Hi all, This is a Webmaster/SEO question. This is the sitemap URL currently in our robots.txt file: http://www.ccisolutions.com/sitemap.xml As you can see it leads to a page with two URLs on it. Is this a problem? Wouldn't it be better to list both of those XML files as separate line items in the robots.txt file? Thanks! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Robots.txt question
What is this robots.txt telling the search engines? User-agent: * Disallow: /stats/
Technical SEO | | DenverKelly0 -
Use of Robots.txt file on a job site
We are performing SEO on a large niche Job Board. My question revolves around the thought of no following all the actual job postings from their clients as they only last for 30 to 60 days. Anybody have any idea on the best way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | WebTalent0 -
Seomoz api for domains working, for domains+directory not?
We're working on a tool using the seomoz api ... for domains we're always getting the right values, but for longer URLs we're having troubles ... Example: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160 won't work http://www.seomoz.org/blog works Any idea what we might be doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | gmellak0