Robot.txt help
-
Hi,
We have a blog that is killing our SEO.
We need to
Disallow
Disallow: /Blog/?tag*
Disallow: /Blog/?page*
Disallow: /Blog/category/*
Disallow: /Blog/author/*
Disallow: /Blog/archive/*
Disallow: /Blog/Account/.
Disallow: /Blog/search*
Disallow: /Blog/search.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/error404.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/archive*
Disallow: /Blog/archive.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/sitemap.axd
Disallow: /Blog/post.aspxBut Allow everything below /Blog/Post
The disallow list seems to keep growing as we find issues. So rather than adding in to our Robot.txt all the areas to disallow. Is there a way to easily just say Allow /Blog/Post and ignore the rest. How do we do that in Robot.txt
Thanks
-
These: http://screencast.com/t/p120RbUhCT
They appear on every page I looked at, and take up the entire area "above the fold" and the content is "below the fold"
-Dan
-
Thanks Dan, but what grey areas, what url are you looking at?
-
Ahh. I see. You just need to "noindex" the pages you don't want in the index. As far as how to do that with blogengine, I am not sure, as I have never used it before.
But I think a bigger issue is like the giant box areas at the top of every page. They are pushing your content way down. That's definitely hurting UX and making the site a little confusing. I'd suggest improving that as well
-Dan
-
Hi Dan, Yes sorry that's the one!
-
Hi There... that address does not seem to work for me. Should it be .net? http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
-Dan
-
Hi
The blog is www.dotnetblogengine.com
The content is only on the blog once it is just it can be accessed lots of different ways
-
Andrew
I doubt that one thing made your rankings drop so much. Also, what type of CMS are you on? Duplicate content like that should be controlled through indexation for the most part, but I am not recognizing that type of URL structure as any particular CMS?
Are just the title tags duplicate or the entire page content? Essentially, I would either change the content of the pages so they are not duplicate, or if that doesn't make sense I would just "noindex" them.
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
I am getting duplicate content errors in WMT like
This is because tag=ABC and page=1 are both different ways to get to www.mysite.com/Blog/Post/My-Blog-Post.aspx
To fix this I have remove the URL's www.mysite.com/Blog/?tag=ABC and www.mysite.com/Blog/?Page=1from GWMT and by setting robot.txt up like
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/PostI hope to solve the duplicate content issue to stop it happening again.
Since doing this my SERP's have dropped massively. Is what I have done wrong or bad? How would I fix?
Hope this makes sense thanks for you help on this its appreciated.
Andrew
-
Hi There
Where are they appearing in WMT? In crawl errors?
You can also control crawling of parameters within webmaster tools - but I am still not quite sure if you are trying to remove these from the index or just prevent crawling (and if preventing crawling, for what reason?) or both?
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
The issue is my blog had tagging switched on, it cause canonicalization mayhem.
I switched it off, but the tags still appears in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT). I Remove URL via GWMT but they are still appearing. This has also caused me to plummet down the SERPs! I am hoping this is why my SERPs had dropped anyway! I am now trying to get to a point where google just sees my blog posts and not the ?Tag or ?Author or any other parameter that is going to cause me canoncilization pain. In the meantime I am sat waiting for google to bring me back up the SERPs when things settle down but it has been 2 weeks now so maybe something else is up?
-
I'm wondering why you want to block crawling of these URLs - I think what you're going for is to not index them, yes? If you block them from being crawled, they'll remain in the index. I would suggest considering robots meta noindex tags - unless you can describe in a little more detail what the issue is?
-Dan
-
Ok then you should be all set if your tests on GWMT did not indicate any errors.
-
Thanks it goes straight to www.mysite.com/Blog
-
Yup, I understand that you want to see your main site. This is why I recommended blocking only /Blog and not / (your root domain).
However, many blogs have a landing page. Does yours? In other words, when you click on your blog link, does it take you straight to Blog/posts or is there another page in between, eg /Blog/welcome?
If it does not go straight into Blog/posts you would want to also allow the landing page.
Does that make sense?
-
The structure is:
www.mysite.com - want to see everything at this level and below it
www.mysite.com/Blog - want to BLOCK everything at this level
www.mysite.com/Blog/posts - want to see everything at this level and below it
-
Well what Martijn (sorry, I spelled his name wrong before) and I were saying was not to forget to allow the landing page of your blog - otherwise this will not be indexed as you are disallowing the main blog directory.
Do you have a specific landing page for your blog or does it go straight into the /posts directory?
I'd say there's nothing wrong with allowing both Blog/Post and Blog/post just to be on the safe side...honestly not sure about case sensitivity in this instance.
-
"We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-)" What was the essential point you missed. sorry I don't understand. I don;t want to make a mistake in my Robot.txt so would like to be 100% sure on what you are saying
-
Thanks guys so I have
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/Postthat works. My Home page also works. I there anything wrong with including both uppercase "Post" and lowercase "post". It is lowercase on the site but want uppercase "P" just incase. Is there a way to make the entry non case sensitive?
Thanks
-
Correct, Martijin. Good catch!
-
There was a reason that I said he should test this!
We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-). As we know also exclude the robots from crawling the 'homepage' of the blog. If you have this homepage don't forget to also Allow it.
-
Well, no point in a blog that hurts your seo
I respectfully disagree with Martijin; I believe what you would want to do is disallow the Blog directory itself, not the whole site. It would seem if you Disallow: / and _Allow:/Blog/Post _ that you are telling SEs not to index anything on your site except for /Blog/Post.
I'd recommend:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/PostThis should block off the entire Blog directory except for your post subdirectory. As Maritijin stated; always test before you make real changes to your robots.txt.
-
That would be something like this, please check this or test this within Google Webmaster Tools if it works because I don't want to screw up your whole site. What this does is disallowing your complete site and just allows the /Blog/Post urls.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /Blog/Post
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
-
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
Language Tunnel - Help!
Hi, First post here. A few months back (before they were my client), my client updated their site to include a language tunnel. It looks like some other updates were made as well to "prettify" the site's URLs. Unfortunately, after this update, lots of well-ranking landing pages are now completely gone with no redirects in place. Normally, I would just give them a list of these old pages and say "301 Redirect" to X page. However, as part of this site update, they added country code into the mix. So now, instead of just 6 or 7 languages, we are looking at 30-40 permutations of language and country (with some countries having multiple languages). The functionality of the new site is fine, but all of the old 404s are not being kind to the search engine traffic. My question is: what's the best way to resolve this problem? These old pages usually specify a language code (but no country code). So, for example, I am thinking of redirecting all of the Spanish 404 urls to a Spanish "country tunnel". However, this is obviously not the same as what we had before, where the actual pages were indexed. Since my old pages no longer exist and I've got this country problem now (to stand in the way of a straightforward redirect), is there any way to appease the SEO gods on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navdm0 -
What is happening with this page's rankings? (G Analytics screenprint attached) help me.
Hi, At the moment im confused. I have a page which shows up for the query 'bank holidays' first page solid for 2 years - this also applies to the terms 'mothers day', 'pancake day' and a few others (UK Google). And there still ranking. Here is the problem: Usually I would rank for 'bank holidays 2014' (the terms with the year in are the real traffic drivers) and would be position 3/5. Over the last 3 months this has decayed dropping position to 30+. From the screenprint you can see the term 'Bank Holidays' is holding on but the term 'bank holidays 2014' is slowly decaying. If you query 'bank holidays 2015' we don't appear in rankings at all. What is causing this? The content is ok, social sharing happens and the odd link is picked up hear and there. I need help, how do I start pushing this back in the other direction, its like the site is slowly dying. And what really kills me, is 2 pages are ranking on page1 off link farms. URL: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays serp-decay.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
New domain purchase 301 and 404 issues. Please help!
We recently purchased www.carwow.com and 301 redirected the site to www.carwow.co.uk (our main domain). The problem is that carwow.com had URLs indexed like www.carwow.com/a-b-c the 301 sends them to carwow.co.uk/a-b-c which obviously doesn't exist so is a 404! What should be done in this situation? Should it be ignored and not re-directed at all, or is there a way to delete/disavow these dead pages? An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile? Any advice would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPursey0 -
Please help with page
We used to use this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html to rank for the words vinyl banner and PVC banner but we have tried to focus the page only on PVC banners and move the vinyl banners word to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/ yet for some reason even though they have both been spidered google has now chosen to rank this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/stickers/vinyl-stickers.html for the vinyl banner words- how do I stop this from happening I thought the home page would be powerful enough to rank for the word with a title inclusion and a spread of the word on the page. Also if anyone can give their opinion on why they thinkhttp://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html does not rank very well I would be truly appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Blocking poor quality content areas with robots.txt
I found an interesting discussion on seoroundtable where Barry Schwartz and others were discussing using robots.txt to block low quality content areas affected by Panda. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-farmer-advice-13090.html The article is a bit dated. I was wondering what current opinions are on this. We have some dynamically generated content pages which we tried to improve after panda. Resources have been limited and alas, they are still there. Until we can officially remove them I thought it may be a good idea to just block the entire directory. I would also remove them from my sitemaps and resubmit. There are links coming in but I could redirect the important ones (was going to do that anyway). Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_edvisors0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990