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.
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
-
Hi SEOmoz,
I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?.
I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective?
How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your reply!
Unfortunately the problem is yet to be fixed, I hope that my disallow will work shortly.
It seems that most of the index.php links to each other internally (and from old /index.php/ pages that no longer exist), which is super weird. How google found them does not make any sense to me.
I don't beleive that external sources are linking to these pages either - I mean, how would they find these links anyway?.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Like Chris, I spidered your site and couldn't find any links to /index.php files, which probably indicates one of two things:
- You've fixed the problem - Yay!
- Or Google is finding those links from external sources
- Google found those links at one time in the past, and is still trying to crawl them.
In the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, if you click on the link of each 404, there's often a "linked from" source where you can see where Google discovered the broken link. This is really helpful in rooting out the cause.
Regardless, I'm going to go with #1 and optimistically believe that you were able to fix the problem.
-
If I spider your site I'm not seeing any /index.php urls. Does that mean you did get Joomla to cooperate with your rewriting?
Or was your problem that you'd previously had urls indexed with /index.php/ paths and you needed to remove them?
-
Hi Mikkel, I have checked your robots.txt, it looks perfect. If you redirect /index.php to home page that using httaccess file or by using any joomla plugin that would great for you. And its also a permanent solution.
-
Well, I tried the sensible solution and redirecting to the correct URL instead. However the SEF program is quite limited and keep on creating new URLs regardless of my modification. Im looking for a more permanent solution, and the disallow seems at bit simple as I'm not a super programmer.
By the way - thanks for quick replys, kudos to both of you!
-
Sure, the website in question is www.vauni.dk
I don't think that there is any inbound links to the index.php pages. They are not easily found.
-
Couldn't you rewrite those /index.php/ urls to remove the /index.php/?
Like this in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Only used Joomla once, but there must be a way to configure joomla to just use "/" instead of "/index.php/"?
Update:
Here's a solution to your /index.php/ issue:
http://www.eprcreations.com/remove-index-php-from-joomla-urls/
Once you've updated that, and have your urls working properly without the /index.php/, you could add this slight modification of the rewrite rule above so that all your old /index.php/ urls would be 301'd to your new ones:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,L]
Put it underneath the RewriteBase / line they describe in that post.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Do you inbound link pointing to you index.php pages ? If yes, then it might affect your seo. Disallow: /index.ph/ is perfect but after implementing it don't inter link those index.php pages. Can you share me your website URL so that I can show you with example. How to do it.
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
-
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Google is indexing my directories
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
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 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?
Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0