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
-
Can someone please tell me if my H1 Tag is in the right place on my View Source. It looks like its in the body and not in the head
Hi Mozzers, I've been looking at the View Source on my landing pages , and it looks to me that my H1 Tag etc is not in the head but in the body . My developer says its in the correct place , but can someone please confirm as it looks wrong to me. short url link - http://goo.gl/vfXeut Many thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
When you add 10.000 pages that have no real intention to rank in the SERP, should you: "follow,noindex" or disallow the whole directory through robots? What is your opinion?
I just want a second opinion 🙂 The customer don't want to loose any internal linkvalue by vaporizing link value though a big amount of internal links. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Robot.txt help
Hi, We have a blog that is killing our SEO. We need to Disallow Disallow: /Blog/?tag*
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio33
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.aspx But 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 Thanks0 -
Our Robots.txt and Reconsideration Request Journey and Success
We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others! A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed. At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools. Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries. From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited. A few weeks passed and things did not normalize. We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week. At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked. This did not change. Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked. We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize. Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked. We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request. This seemed to be our only hope. So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue. A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem. Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use. Major backfire. We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us. To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore. They did.... So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com. We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text. We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs. To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away! Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all. Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog. Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT. Then we waited... A few days later, we already had a response. DENIED. In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links. When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link. It was an interesting example. We actually already had this blog in removem. The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com. So, we went back to the drawing board. This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem. That added a few more links. We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links. We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress. We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials. We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest. A few days later, we had a message in WMT. DENIED AGAIN! This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove. The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google. Only a message in WMT. So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was. Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED! This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well. So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google. Our robots.txt issue. We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for. We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it. So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue. The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again. The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000! Success! We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero. So, some thoughts: 1. Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT? Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time? If the latter is the case then... 2. Did our reconsideration request backfire? Or, was it ultimately for the best? 3. When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known? If you want example links, ask for them. It never hurts to ask! If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be! 4. If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it. I wouldn't over do this or spam them. Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask. Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions. Thanks for reading! TheCraig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCraig5 -
Robots.txt: Syntax URL to disallow
Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs? Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file. The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand") Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ? I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
How to get your company on the Google +, Right Hand side box of search results?
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-content-replaces-ads/41452/ We have a Google plus page, but the results aren't coming up there Do you need a certain amount of people in your circles, what is the criteria to get your brand here? Any links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Using the right Schema.org - & is there a penalty in using the wrong one?
Hi We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd reviews. We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants - should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant) or schema.org - product + agg review score? What do you do for your product listing pages? If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie1 -
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