Block Googlebot from submit button
-
Hi,
I have a website where many searches are made by the googlebot on our internal engine. We can make noindex on result page, but we want to stop the bot to call the ajax search button - GET form (because it pass a request to an external API with associate fees).
So, we want to stop crawling the form button, without noindex the search page itself. The "nofollow" tag don't seems to apply on button's submit.
Any suggestion?
-
Hey Olivier,
You could detect the user agent and hide the button. The difference isn't substantial enough to be called cloaking.
Or you could make the button not actually a button tag, but another tag with that traps clicks with a JS event. I'm not sure Google's headless browser is smart enough to automate that. I would try this first and if it doesn't work switch to the user agent detection idea.
Let us know how it goes!
-Mike
-
-
Can always do it in a programme the bot's can't use or hide it behind a log in field etc.
I also give you the following for consumption :
http://moz.com/blog/12-ways-to-keep-your-content-hidden-from-the-search-engines
Good luck!
-
Hi Bernard
Are you able to provide a link to the web form containing the submit button?
Peter
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
-
URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers Symptoms : On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap However, those URLs are in the sitemap Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message Potential explanation : We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017. We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ? We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZozoMe0 -
How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?
We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com. As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp. This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase. However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket0 -
Robots.txt - Googlebot - Allow... what's it for?
Hello - I just came across this in robots.txt for the first time, and was wondering why it is used? Why would you have to proactively tell Googlebot to crawl JS/CSS and why would you want it to? Any help would be much appreciated - thanks, Luke User-Agent: Googlebot Allow: /.js Allow: /.css
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Dmoz: I want to submit but I think the SEO company I was working with already did, how to check this?
Hi Guys, A part from the obvious I have searched Dmoz to see if my company was listed and its still not listed after 8 months. I have 3 top level domains same content, but targeting different countries, can I submit all 3 domains or only one? Any other way to find out if my domain for NZ was approved? I would love to submit the AU,and COM but not sure if I would be going outside their guidelines. Any insight would be much appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Is there a way to show random blocks of text to users without it affecting SEO? Cloaking for good?
My client has a pretty creative idea for his web copy. In the body of his page there will be a big block of text that contains random industry related terms but within that he will bold and colorize certain words that create a coherent sentence. Something to the effect of "cut through the noise with a marketing team that gets results". Get it? So if you were to read the paragraph word-for-word it would make no sense at all. It's basically a bunch of random words. He's worried this will affect his SEO and appear to be keyword stuffing to Google. My question is: Is there a way to block certain text on a webpage from search engines but show them to users? I guess it would be the opposite of cloaking? But it's still cloaking...isn't it? In the end we'll probably just make the block of text an image instead but I was just wondering if anyone has any creative solutions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheOceanAgency0 -
Google: How to See URLs Blocked by Robots?
Google Webmaster Tools says we have 17K out of 34K URLs that are blocked by our Robots.txt file. How can I see the URLs that are being blocked? Here's our Robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: /swish.cgi Disallow: /demo Disallow: /reviews/review.php/new/ Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/order.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/productsearch.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/billing.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/inv.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/new_options.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/registration.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/tellfriend.cgi Disallow: /*?gdftrk Sitemap: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/google-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
Is User Agent Detection still a valid method for blocking certain URL parameters from the Search Engines?
I'm concerned with the cloaking issue. Has anyone successfully implemented user agent detection to provide the Search engines with "clean" URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyaRiemer0