Robots Disallow Backslash - Is it right command
-
Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character
ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product
www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product
Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk
Need to know for command :-
User-agent: * Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,
-
Thanks, you seem lucky to me.. Almost after 2 month i have got the code for making all these encoded url's redirect correctly. Finally, now if one types
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
then he's redirected through 301 to the correct url
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
-
Hello Gagan,
I think the best way to handle this would be using the rel canonical tag or rewriting the URLs to get rid of the parameters and replace them with something more user-friendly.
The rel canonical tag would be the easiest way out of those two. I notice the version without the encoding (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 ) have a rel canonical tag that correctly references itself as the canonical version. However, the encoded URLs (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10) which is actually http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 does NOT have a rel canonical tag.
If the version with the backslash had a rel canonical tag stating that the following URL is canonical it would solve your issue, I think.
Canonical URL:
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 -
Sure, If i show you some url they are crawled as :-
Sample Incorrect URLs crawled and reported as duplicate one in Google Webmaster & Moz too
|
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
| http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=category&Itemid=2 |
|
Correct URL
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2
What we found online
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. URLs cannot contain spaces.
%22 reflects - " and %5c as \ (forward slash)
We intend to remove these duplicate one created having %22 and %5c within them..
Many thanks
-
I am not entirely sure I understood your question as intended, but I will do my best to answer.
I would not put this in my robots.txt flie because it could possibly be misunderstood as a forward slash, in which case your entire domain would be blocked:
Disallow: \
We can possibly provide you with some alternative suggestions on how to keep Google from crawling those pages if you could share some real examples.
It may be best to rewrite/redirect those URls instead since they don't seem to be the canonical version you intend to be presented to the user.
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
-
Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
Hello the great Moz Community! Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world. Our company website is performing great on SERP. We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more... Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website! I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally! Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing! There are different cases! For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP. This can be done in 2 different ways: I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage. Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA) Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting? What hreflangs to use? I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated! Thank you! Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betconstruct
Gev0 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
How do I get my site to rank in the right country?
I work with an organization in the United States that purchased a 3 letter .com domain from another company based in the Netherlands. After transferring the domain and setting up the new site we've completed the following: Registered the site in Webmaster Tools and selected the United States as the international target target Used Schema Markup on the US business address Built links from US based websites Setup a Google My Business site and verified the address All site content is in english Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website Despite these actions, our website rarely shows up in Google.com search results. However, we're in the top 10 for many of the same queries when performing searches at Google.nl - Interestingly enough, if we set our location for the US and do a search in Google.nl we do not show up in the search results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianspatterson
It has been about 18 months since we've completed these actions and Google still assumes our website is best served and targeted towards people in the Netherlands. Is there anything else we can do to fix this?Thanks!0 -
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 -
Will disallowing in robots.txt noindex a page?
Google has indexed a page I wish to remove. I would like to meta noindex but the CMS isn't allowing me too right now. A suggestion o disallow in robots.txt would simply stop them crawling I expect or is it also an instruction to noindex? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
301 redirect or Robots.txt on an interstatial page
Hey guys, I have an affiliate tracking system that works like this : an affiliate puts up a certain code on his site, for example : www.domain.com/track/aff_id This url leads to a page where the hit is counted, analysed and then 302 redirects to my sales page with the affiliates ID in the url : www.mysalespage.com/?=aff_id. However, we've noticed recently that one affiliate seems to be ranking for our own name and the url google indexed was his tracking url (domain.com/track/aff_id). Which is strange because there is absolutely nothing on that page, its just an interstatial page so that our stats tracking software can properly filter hits. To remove the affiliate's url from showing up in the serps, I've come up with 2 solutions : 1 - Change the redirect to a 301 redirect on his track page. 2 - Change our robots.txt page to block all domain.com/track/ pages from being indexed. My question is : if I 301 redirect instead of 302, will I keep the affiliates from outranking me for my own name AND pass on link juice or should I simply block google from crawling the interstatial tracking pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
Robots.txt disallow subdomain
Hi all, I have a development subdomain, which gets copied to the live domain. Because I don't want this dev domain to get crawled, I'd like to implement a robots.txt for this domain only. The problem is that I don't want this robots.txt to disallow the live domain. Is there a way to create a robots.txt for this development subdomain only? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Partouter0 -
Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?
I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4. Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good? What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280