Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
-
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received.
One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content".
Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content.
Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site.
My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears.
Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google.
So i just want to get rid of them.
Now to my question
I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all.
But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be?
A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send:
http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167
I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this:
view=send_friend
-
Hi Henrik,
It can take up to a week for SEOmoz crawlers to process your site, which may be an issue if you recently added the tag. Did you remember to include all user agents in your first line?
User-agent: *Be sure to test your robots.txt file in Google Webmaster Tools to ensure everything is correct.
Couple of other things you can do:
1. Add a rel="nofollow" on your send to friend links.
2. Add a meta robots "noindex" to the head of the popup html.
3. And/or add a canonical tag to the popup. Since I don't have a working example, I don't know what to canonical it too (whatever content it is duplicating) but this is also an option.
-
I just tried to add
Disallow: /view=send_friend
I removed the last /
however a crawl gave me the dublicate content problem again.
Is my syntax wrong?
-
The second one "Disallow: /*view=send_friend" will prevent googlebot from crawling any url with that string in it. So that should take care of your problem.
-
So my link example would look like this in robots.txt?
Disallow: /index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=&tmpl=component&Itemid=
Or
Disallow: /view=send_friend/
-
Your right I would disallow via robots.txt & a wildcard (*) wherever a unique item id # could be generated.
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
-
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
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 -
Ratio of linking C-blocks to Linking domains
Hi, Our linkbuilding efforts have resulted in acquiring a high number of backlinks from domains within a C-block. We all know Google issues penalties whenever someone's link profile looks unnatural. A high number of backlinks but a low number of linking C-blocks would seem to be one of reasons to get penalized. Example: we have 6,000 links from 200 linking root domains coming in from 100 C-blocks. At what point should we start to worry about being penalized/giving off an unnatural look to mr G?
Technical SEO | | waidohuy0 -
Will I still get Duplicate Meta Data Errors with the correct use of the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags?
Hi Guys, One of our sites has an extensive number category page lsitings, so we implemented the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for these pages (as suggested by Google below), However, we still see duplicate meta data errors in SEOMoz crawl reports and also in Google webmaster tools. Does the SEOMoz crawl tool test for the correct use of rel="next" and "prev" tags and not list meta data errors, if the tags are correctly implemented? Or, is it necessary to still use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, even though we are using the rel="next" and "prev" tags, as recommended by Google? Thanks, George Implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev” If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let’s get started! Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs: http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
Technical SEO | | gkgrant
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4 On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section: On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2: On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3: And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4: A few points to mention: The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup. Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup. The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the section, not within the document . We allow rel=”previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=”prev” links. rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: rel=”prev” and rel=”next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives. When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.0 -
BEST Wordpress Robots.txt Sitemap Practice??
Alright, my question comes directly from this article by SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt Yes, I have submitted the sitemap to google, bing's webmaster tools and and I want to add the location of our site's sitemaps and does it mean that I erase everything in the robots.txt right now and replace it with? <code>User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml</code> <code>???</code> because Wordpress comes with some default disallows like wp-admin, trackback, plugins. I have also read other questions. but was wondering if this is the correct way to add sitemap on Wordpress Robots.txt http://www.seomoz.org/q/robots-txt-question-2 http://www.seomoz.org/q/quick-robots-txt-check. http://www.seomoz.org/q/xml-sitemap-instruction-in-robots-txt-worth-doing I am using Multisite with Yoast plugin so I have more than one sitemap.xml to submit Do I erase everything in Robots.txt and replace it with how SEOmoz recommended? hmm that sounds not right. User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | joony2008
Disallow:
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /comments **ERASE EVERYTHING??? and changed it to** <code> <code>
<code>User-agent: *
Disallow: </code> Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml</code> <code>``` Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sub/sitemap_index.xml ```</code> <code>?????????</code> ```</code>0 -
Cn I use SEOMOZ to find "Bad Links"
We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them. We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Is using a customer quote on multiple pages duplicate content?
Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0
