Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
-
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
-
Thanks guys!
-
You bet - Cheers!
-
Clever PHD,
You are correct. I have found that these little housekeeping issues like eliminating duplicate content really do make a big difference.
Ron
-
I thinks Ron's point was that if you have a bunch of duplicates, the dups are not "real" pages, if you are only counting "real" pages. Therefore, if Google indexes your "real" pages and the dup versions of them, you can have more pages indexed. That is the issue then that you have duplicate versions of the same page in Google's index and so which will rank for a given key term? You could be competing against yourself. That is why it is so important you deal with crawl issues.
-
Thank you. Just curious, how would the number of pages indexed be higher than the number of actual pages?
-
I think you are looking at the pages indexed which is generally a higher number than those on your web site. There is a point to marking things up so that there is a no follow on any pages that you do not want indexed as well as properly marking up the web pages that you do specifically want indexed. It is really important that you eliminate duplicate pages. A common source of these duplicates is improper tags on the blog. Make sure that your tags are set up in a logical hierarchy like your site map. This will assist the search engines when they re index your page.
Hope this helps,
Ron
-
You want to have as many pages in the index as possible, as long as they are high quality pages with original content - if you publish quality original articles on a regular basis, you want to have all those pages indexed. Yes, from a practical perspective you may only be able to focus on tweaking the SEO on a portion of them, but if you have good SEO processes in place as you produce those pages, they will rank long term for a broad range of terms and bring traffic..
If you have 20,000 pages as you have an online catalog and you have 345 different ways to sort the same set of page results, or if you have keyword search URLs, or printer friendly version pages or your shopping cart pages, you do not want those indexed. These pages are typically, low quality/thin content pages and/or are duplicates and those do you no favor. You would want to use the noindex meta tag or canonical where appropriate. The reality is that out of the 20,000 pages, there are probably only a subset that are the "originals" and so you dont want to waste Googles time in crawling those pages.
A good concept here to look up is Crawl Budget or Crawl Optimization
http://searchengineland.com/how-i-think-crawl-budget-works-sort-of-59768
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 do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Robots.txt
Hi all, Happy New Year! I want to block certain pages on our site as they are being flagged (according to my Moz Crawl Report) as duplicate content when in fact that isn't strictly true, it is more to do with the problems faced when using a CMS system... Here are some examples of the pages I want to block and underneath will be what I believe to be the correct robots.txt entry... http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=viewNewContent&search_app=members&search_app_filters[forums][searchInKey]=&period=today&userMode=&followedItemsOnly= Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=search http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports&rcom=gallery&imageId=980&ctyp=image Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post§ion=post&do=reply_post&f=146&t=741&qpid=13308 Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/small/ http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/large/ Disallow: /forum/gallery/sizes/ Any help \ advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Consolidating MANY separate domains into a much better, single URL: Should I point a landing page or redirect to the new site?
I am consolidating a site for a client who previously, and very foolishly, broke up their domains like so: companyparis.com companyflorence.com companyrome.com etc... I am now done with the new site, which will be at: company.eu with pages as appropriate: company.eu/paris company.eu/florence company.eu/rome This domain, although not entirely new, does not have much authority or rank. In terms of SEO and link-building, is it better to redirect the old domain to the specific page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> company.eu/paris or... is it better to put a landing page at the old domain LINKING to the page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> landing page linking to --> company.eu/paris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thongly0 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
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 -
Negative impact on crawling after upload robots.txt file on HTTPS pages
I experienced negative impact on crawling after upload robots.txt file on HTTPS pages. You can find out both URLs as follow. Robots.txt File for HTTP: http://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt Robots.txt File for HTTPS: https://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt I have disallowed all crawlers for HTTPS pages with following syntax. User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
Disallow: / Does it matter for that? If I have done any thing wrong so give me more idea to fix this issue.0