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.
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?
-
One step at a time = long term success. I wish you the best with it Jordan.
-
Thanks Alan, you are right this site has quite a long way to go. The first crawl was just finished and I notice that the most errors were due to dupe content so I decided I would try and tackle that first. Thank you for all the pointers, I will be taking a look at all those as soon as I can.
-
Totally agree with Alan, it can cause circular navigation problems for crawlers too.
-
Jordan,
Others might have a different view, however that's exactly what I recommend to clients. but only if you've got other html link based ways for bots to get to all the content in a direct manner, and have a good sitemap.xml file to reinforce that.
I am happy to see that you have a sound overall site architecture, however I see no robots.txt file at your root so I'm not sure what's up with that. Also your sitemap.xml file only has 43 URLs in it. that's a problem not because google can't find content by other means, it's just that I've found Google likes that reinforcement, and Bing especially does a better job discovering content with a proper sitemap.xml submitted through their webmaster system (they're less efficient at discovering content by other means).
I'd also suggest you have a big push ahead in dealing with near-duplicate content.
For example:
http://www.durafaucet.com/mk850-orb.html
http://www.durafaucet.com/kitchen-faucets/mk850.html
Sure, these are unique products. Except there's already so little unique content on either page that the common content compounded by the site-wide replication of top, sidebar and footer content means the total weight of uniqueness is on the very minor end of the spectrum.
And then there's the issue of a complete lack of inbound link authority - OpenSiteExplorer.org might be wrong, but currently shows almost no inbound links. Not only will you need inbound links to the home page, but also to as many inner pages as is realistic in terms of implementation capabilities go. This is especially true for category level pages. (including a variety of inbound link anchor text - brand, domain, keyword phrase and generic text).
So if you don't address those type of issues, removing all the dupes that show up in search now won't result in as much long-term value as you'll need.
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
-
Another company is coming up in search results when I type in my phone number
If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541, another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up. We do not come up at all for this search. However, if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not. Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Search Console Errors 400 and 405
Hi, Does anyone know if search console errors showing as follows are damaging to serps: /xmlrpc.php is returning 405 error /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php is returning 400 error These errors seem to of coincided almost to the day that there was a ranking drop for the primary keyword from mid page 1 to bottom of page 2. No matter what I do I cannot seem to correct these errors. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Robot.txt : How to block a specific file type in several subdirectories ?
Hello everyone ! I need help setting up a robot.txt. I'm trying to block all pdf files in particular directories so I'm using this command. In the example below the line is blocking all .gif in the entire site. Block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif) | Disallow: /*.gif$ 2 questions : Can I use this command to specify one particular directory in which I want to block pdf files ? Will this line be recognized by googlebots ? Disallow: /fileadmin/xxxxxxx/xxx/xxxxxxx/*.pdf$ Then I realized that I would have to write as many lines as many directories there are in which I want to block pdf files. Let's say I want to block pdf files in all these 3 directories /fileadmin/directory1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1/pdf Is there a pattern-matching rule I could use to blocks access to pdf files in all subdirectories instead of writing 3x the above line for each subdirectory ? For exemple : Disallow: /fileadmin/directory1*/ Many thanks in advance for any insight you may have.
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Parked domain is first in search results
We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.
Technical SEO | | Exotissimo0 -
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/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio
Technical SEO | | SharewarePros0