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.
Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
-
Hi Mozzers!
We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter.
We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming.
But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems.
What could be the reason?
Best regards,
Martin
-
Sorry for the late reply. Feel free to send me a PM. (not sure I can help, but more than happy to take a look)
-
We do not currently have any sanitation rules in order to maintain the nocrawl param. But that is a good point. 301:ing will be difficult for us but I will definitely add the nocrawl param to the rel canonical of those internal SERPs.
-
Thank you, Igol. I will definitely look into your first suggestion.
-
Thank you, Cyrus.
This is what it looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /nocrawl=1The weird thing is that when testing one of the sample URLs (given by Google as "problematic" in the GWMT message and that contains the nocrawl param) on the GWMT "Blocked URLs" page by entering the contents of our robots.txt and the sample URL, Google says crawling of the URL is disallowed for Googlebot.
On the top of the same page, it says "Never" under the heading "Fetched when" (translated from Swedish..). But when i "Fetch as Google" our robots.txt, Googlebot has no problems fetching it. So i guess the "Never" information is due to a GWMT bug?
I also tested our robots.txt against your recommended service http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check. It says all robots has access to the sample URL above, but I gather the tool is not wildcard-savvy.
I will not disclose our domain in this context, please tell me if it is ok to send you a PW.
About the noindex stuff. Basically, the nocrawl param is added to internal links pointing to internal search result pages filtered by more than two params. Although we allow crawling of less complicated internal serps, we disallow indexing of most of them by "meta noindex".
-
Thanks.
100% agree with the Meta Noindex suggestion.
-
It can be tricky blocking parameters with robots.txt. The first thing you want to do is make sure your are actually blocking the URLs. There are a few good robots.txt checkers out there that can help:
You're file is probably going to look something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?nocrawl=1... but this could vary depending on exactly you don't want crawled
+1 to Igal's suggestion of handling these via parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
Finally, if your goal is to keep search results out of the index (it probably should be) then you should also highly consider using a meta robots NOINDEX tag on all search results pages. You can also slap a nofollow on links pointing to search results as this might also help Google steer clear of those pages.
Best of luck!
Edit: Here's what John Wu of Google Webmaster has to say...
"We show this warning when we find a high number of URLs on a site -- even before we attempt to crawl them. If you are blocking them with a robots.txt file, that's generally fine. If you really do have a high number of URLs on your site, you can generally ignore this message. If your site is otherwise small and we find a high number of URLs, then this kind of message can help you to fix any issues (or disallow access) before we start to access your server to check gazillions of URLs :-)."
-
Didn't say it wasn't.
I`m just not sure how these rules apply to parameters, since they are not a part of the "core" URL.
(For example: What happens if I take a URL from your site, change a nocrawl=1 to nocrawl=0 and link to it from mine?
Do you have any URL sanitation rules in place to overcome that or will the page be indexed by Googlebot when it crawls my site and moves on to yours?)Personally, when dealing with parameters, I find it easier to work with WMT so I was offering an easier workaround, (at least for me)
To tell you the truth, I would use hard-coded on page meta noindex/nofollow here (again, as parameters can be so easily manipulated).
-
Igal, thank your for replying.
But robots.txt disallowing URLs by matching patterns has been supported by Googlebot for a long time now.
-
Hi
I`m not sure if this is the best way to go about it.
Robots.txt is commonly used for folder level disallow rules, I`m not sure how it will respond to parameters.
Having said that, there are several things you can do here:
1. You can use WMT to zero in on this parameter and prevent it from being searched.
To do so choose Configuration>>URL Parameters, answer "Yes" to the question about content change and
check-in the 3rd bullet (Only URL with value...) Of course you'll need to choose "1" as the right value.2. If this still didn't solve your issue, you might want to try using htacess + regex to prevent access by user agent.
You can find user-agent information here Googlebot user agent listAlso, you may want to check my blog post about some of the less known Googlebot Facts (shameless self-promotion)
Best
Igal
-
I'll send you a PW, Des.
-
What the domain.?
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
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
Disallow wildcard match in Robots.txt
This is in my robots.txt file, does anyone know what this is supposed to accomplish, it doesn't appear to be blocking URLs with question marks Disallow: /?crawler=1
Technical SEO | | AmandaBridge
Disallow: /?mobile=1 Thank you0 -
Is there a limit to how many URLs you can put in a robots.txt file?
We have a site that has way too many urls caused by our crawlable faceted navigation. We are trying to purge 90% of our urls from the indexes. We put no index tags on the url combinations that we do no want indexed anymore, but it is taking google way too long to find the no index tags. Meanwhile we are getting hit with excessive url warnings and have been it by Panda. Would it help speed the process of purging urls if we added the urls to the robots.txt file? Could this cause any issues for us? Could it have the opposite effect and block the crawler from finding the urls, but not purge them from the index? The list could be in excess of 100MM urls.
Technical SEO | | kcb81780 -
Some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error.
Hello I'm a seo newbie and some help from the community here would be greatly appreciated. I have submitted the sitemap of my website in google webmasters tools and now I got this warning: "When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted." How do I fix this? What should I do? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | GoldenRanking140 -
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
Technical SEO | | lzhao0 -
Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?
I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
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 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0