Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
-
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us?
I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
-
90% not, first of all, check if google indexed them, if not, your robots.txt should do it, however I would reinforce that by making sure those URLs are our of your sitemap file and make sure your robots's disallows are set to ALL *, not just google for example.
Google's duplicity policies are tough, but they will always respect simple policies such as robots.txt.
I had a case in the past when a customer had a dedicated IP, and google somehow found it, so you could see both the domain's pages and IP's pages, both the same, we simply added a .htaccess rule to point the IP requests to the domain, and even when the situation was like that for long, it doesn't seem to have affected them. In theory google penalizes duplicity but not in this particular cases, it is a matter of behavior.
Regards!
-
I've seen people say that in "rare" cases, links blocked by Robots.txt will be shown as search results but there's no way I can imagine that would happen if it's duplicates of your content.
Robots.txt lets a search engine know not to crawl a directory - but if another resource links to it, they may know it exists, just not the content of it. They won't know if it's noindex or not because they don't crawl it - but if they know it exists, they could rarely return it. Duplicate content would have a better result, therefore that better result will be returned, and your test sites should not be...
As far as hurting your site, no way. Unless a page WAS allowed, is duplicate, is now NOT allowed, and hasn't been recrawled. In that case, I can't imagine it would hurt you that much either. I wouldn't worry about it.
(Also, noindex doesn't matter on these pages. At least to Google. Google will see the noindex first and will not crawl the page. Until they crawl the page it doesn't matter if it has one word or 300 directives, they'll never see it. So noindex really wouldn't help unless a page had already slipped through.)
-
I don't believe they are going to hurt you, it is more of a warning that if you are trying to have these indexed that at the moment they can't be accessed. When you don't want them to be indexed i.e. in this case, I don't believe you are suffering because of 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
-
How can I remove my old sites URL from showing up in Google?
Hi everyone. We have had a new site up for over a year now. When I search site:sqlsentry.net the old url still shows up and while those pages are redirected to .com I'd like to get the .net URL's out of google forever. What is the best way I can go about that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
Baidu Spider appearing on robots.txt
Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it. This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below) User-agent: Baiduspider
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: / I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website? Thanks for your help,
-Reed0 -
Google tagged URL an overly-dynamic URL?
I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links. Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc) I've turned some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Can Dramatically Increasing Site Size Have Negative Effects?
I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages? Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this? Any other considerations? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Should I robots block this directory?
There's about 43k pages indexed in this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines. Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory? ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0