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.
How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
-
Anyone has any idea how to block an entire product category, including all the products in that category using the robots.txt file? I'm using woocommerce in wordpress and i'd like to prevent bots from crawling every single one of products urls for now.
The confusing part right now is that i have several different url structures linking to every single one of my products for example www.mystore.com/all-products, www.mystore.com/product-category, etc etc.
I'm not really sure how i'd type it into the robots.txt file, or where to place the file.
any help would be appreciated thanks
-
Thanks for the detailed answer, i will give it a try!
-
Hi
This should do it, you place the robots.txt in the root directory of your site.
User-agent: * Disallow: /product-category/
You can check out some more examples here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
As for the multiple urls linking to the same pages, you will just need to check all possible variants and make sure you have them covered in the robots.txt file.
Google webmaster tools has a page where you can use to check if the robots.txt file is doing what you expect it to do (under Health -> Blocked Urls).
It might be easier to block the pages with a meta tag as described in the link above if you are running a plugin allowing this, that should take care of all the different url structures also.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Random /feed 404 error from a wordpress site
My Moz Analytics report shows a 404 error on a page which I think should not exist at all. The URL is http://henryplumbingco.com/portfolio-item/butler-elementary/feed/. When I checked webmaster tools, it looks like there are a number of random /feed urls throwing 404 errors. I am using WordPress and the Enfold theme. Anyone know how to get rid of these errors? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | aj6130 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Using keywords in my URL: Doing a redirect to /keyword
My website in "On Page Grade" received an A.Anyway, I only have 1 thing to optimize:_"Use Keywords in your URL__Using your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links."_My website is ranking in top10 for a super high competitive keyword and all my others competitors have the keyword on their domain, but not for my URL.Since I can't change my domain for fixing this suggestion, I would like to know what do you think about doing a 301 redirect from / to mydomainname.com/keyword/So the index of my website would be the /keyword.I don't know if this can make a damage to my SERP for the big change ir it would be a great choice.
On-Page Optimization | | estebanseo0 -
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
Tags vs. Categories? What should I use?
I'm starting with a blog (self-hosted wordpress) and I'm thinking of the following content structure so that the readers are easily able to locate relevant content: Background: It's a blog which gives people relevant info about government jobs. To start with we will just be publishing information about these jobs but over a period of time also intend to post content that helps readers prepare for these jobs. In other words, right now it's just about detailed job notifications but in the coming months, we shall also post about preparation-related information. Typically, each of the job notifications can be bifurcated like: Jobs basis industry Banking Railways Clinical, etc. Jobs basis company ABC co. DEF co. XYZ co. etc. Jobs basis State / City City 1 City 2, etc. Jobs basis educational qualification Graduation Post-Graduation, etc. Now, I'm seriously confused how should I structure this data from the perspective of Categories & Tags such that it's reader as well as SEO-friendly. Do note that each of the government jobs post ideally falls in a couple of above mentioned categories. Thanks..
On-Page Optimization | | Shalin.TJ0 -
State Abbreviations and/or Fully Spelled Out?
Should State names be abbreviated and/or fully spelled out in title tags, meta descriptions and body content? Does Google know that VT = Vermont?
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen0 -
Impact of removing category sidebar with keywords?
Our site (a niche financial publication: insideARM.com) requires some more room in the sidebar. We're considering removing the categories (we call them topics) sidebar block, or cutting down the number of items displayed within it. My concern is that we'd be removing a direct link to landing pages for important keyword terms from our most powerful page (the index). Sure, we have the terms listed in the footer, but I am worried that the position change will lower the value of the links. Our users don't really use these links for navigational purposes, which is why it comes up as a potential removed item. Am I wrong to worry about this? Would we be crippling our category pages by doing this?
On-Page Optimization | | insideARM0 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2