Robots.txt Question
-
For our company website faithology.com we are attempting to block out any urls that contain a ? mark to keep google from seeing some pages as duplicates.
Our robots.txt is as follows:
User-Agent: * Disallow: /*? User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /community/ Is the above correct? We are wanting them to not crawl any url with a "?" inside, however we don't want to harm ourselves in seo. Thanks for your help!
-
You can use wild-cards, in theory, but I haven't tested "?" and that could be a little risky. I'd just make sure it doesn't over-match.
Honestly, though, Robots.txt isn't as reliable as I'd like. It can be good for preventing content from being indexed, but once that content has been crawled, it's not great for removing it from the index. You might be better off with META NOINDEX or using the rel=canonical tag.
It depends a lot on what parameters you're trying to control, what value these pages have, whether they have links, etc. A wholesale block of everything with "?" seems really dangerous to me, IMO.
If you want to give a few example URLs, maybe we could give you more specific advice.
-
if I were you I would want to be 100% sure I got it right. This tool has never let me down and the way you have Roger bot he may be blocked.
Why not use a free tool from a very reputable company to make your robot text perfect
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-tester/
then lastly to make sure everything is perfect I recommend one of my favorite free tools up to 500 pages is as many times as you want that costs I believe $70 a year
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
his one of the best tools on the planet
while you're at Internet marketing ninjas website look for other tools they have loads of excellent tools that are recommend here.
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Yes you can
Robots.txt Wildcard Matching
Google and Microsoft's Bing allow the use of wildcards in robots.txt files.
To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?), you could use the following entry:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?You can use the $ character to specify matching the end of the URL. For instance, to block an URLs that end with .asp, you could use the following entry:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.asp$More background on wildcards available from Google and Yahoo! Search.
More
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/
hope I was of help,
Tom
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
-
Not sure how we're blocking homepage in robots.txt; meta description not shown
Hi folks! We had a question come in from a client who needs assistance with their robots.txt file. Metadata for their homepage and select other pages isn't appearing in SERPs. Instead they get the usual message "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more". At first glance, we're not seeing the homepage or these other pages as being blocked by their robots.txt file: http://www.t2tea.com/robots.txt. Does anyone see what we can't? Any thoughts are massively appreciated! P.S. They used wildcards to ensure the rules were applied for all locale subdirectories, e.g. /en/au/, /en/us/, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchDeploy0 -
Canonicals question ref canonicals pointing to redundant urls
Hi, SCENARIO: A site has say 3 examples of the same product page but with different urls because that product fits into 3 different categories e.g. /tools/hammer /handtools/hammer /specialoffers/hammer and lets say the first 2 of those have the canonical pointing to /specialoffers/hammer YET that page is now redundant e.g. the webmaster decided to do away with the /specialoffers/ folder. ASSUMPTIONS: That is going to seriously hamper the chances of the 2 remaining versions of the hammer page being able to rank as they have canonicals pointing to a url that no longer exists. The canonical tags should be changed to point to 1 of the remaining url versions. As an added complication - lets say /specialoffers/hammer still exists, the url works, but just isn't navigable from the site. Thoughts/feedback welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Question spam malware causing many indexed pages
Hey Mozzers, I was speaking with a friend today about a site that he has been working on that was infected when he began working on it. Here (https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:themeliorist.ca) you can see that the site has 4400 indexed pages, but if you scroll down you will see some pages such as /pfizer-viagra-samples/ or /dapoxetine-kentucky/. All of these pages are returning 404 errors, and I ran it through SEO spider just to see if any of these pages would show up, and they don't. This is not an issue for a client, but I am just curious why these pages are still hanging around in the index. Maybe others have experience this issue too. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Google PR & OSE DA/PA Question
Hey Moz Community, Can anyone explain why a website would have a PR4 Home page and most inner pages PR3 with only a DA12 and PA14 from OSE? The website in question is my Rotary club http://carymacgregorrotary.org. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations
Patrick0 -
Panda Recovery Question
Dear Friends, One of my customers was hit by the Panda, we were working on improve the tiny content on several pages and the remaining pages were: 1 NOINDEX/FOLLOW 2. Removed from sitemap.xml 3. Un-linked from the site (no one page on the site link to the pour content) As conclusion we can't see any improvement, my question is should I remove the pour content pages (404)? What is your recommendation? Thank you for your time Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Quick Rel Canonical Link Juice Question
Let's say I have two duplicate pages, A and B. However, A has 5 external links and B has 3 _different _external links. If I add the rel canonical tag to B, so that A is the "master page" do I also lose whatever link juice was going to B from the 3 external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Robots.txt 404 problem
I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0