Robots.txt assistance
-
I want to block all the inner archive news pages of my website in robots.txt - we don't have R&D capacity to set up rel=next/prev or create a central page that all inner pages would have a canonical back to, so this is the solution.
The first page I want indexed reads:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=1all subsequent pages that I want blocked because they don't contain any new content read:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=2
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=3
etc....There are currently 245 inner archived pages and I would like to set it up so that future pages will automatically be blocked since we are always writing new news pieces. Any advice about what code I should use for this?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for all the input and advice!
We are a gaming site that publishes industry news 2-3 times a week, but that is not our main source of income
-
"I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction"
Absolutely.
-
Thanks Andy. I did see that and that is why I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction.
If they are short on money/resources/capacity and the robots.txt solution could actually negatively impact indexation of content that is producing/justifying the current level of money/resources/capacity they could end up in worse position than where they started, i.e. having less money/resources/capacity.
-
If you read the original post again, Sara says "we don't have R&D capacity".
They wouldn't be able to do all this.
-Andy
-
I think you are missing something here if you want to get these pages out of the index. Plus, your use of Robots may harm how Google finds and ranks your actual news items.
First, you have to add the noindex meta tag to pages 2-N in your pagination. Let Google crawl them and take them out of the index.
If you just add them to robots.txt, Google will not crawl, but will also not remove them from the index.
Once you get them out of the index, keeping those tags in place will prevent reindexation and you don't have to add them to Robots.txt.
More importantly, you want pages 2-N being spidered but not indexed. You want Google to crawl your paginated pages to find all of your deep content. Otherwise, unless you have a XML or HTML sitemap, or some other crawlable navigational aid, you are actually preventing Google from crawling and then ranking your content.
Read this Moz post
http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
There is a section titled "Why Meta Robots is Better than Robots.txt" that will confirm my points.
Lastly. Step back a second. If you are a news/content site and this helps you to generate revenue, and you have a bunch of news pages, and this is important content, spend some money on Development to implement the rel=next/prev. It is worth it to get Google crawling your stuff properly.
Good luck!
-
Definitely something to test. I'm not sure of the rules that Google will apply with this and which way round works.
-Andy
-
I think it has to be the other way around: Disallow: /?p=* Allow: /?p=1 as you want to first disallow everything with the P parameter but then allow the first page. You should test it but I think in Andy's example you will still block the first page which you've just allowed.
-
I haven't actually done this myself, but I suspect that pattern matching is your solution here.
However, what you want to be able to do is disallow the whole pattern and then allow just the first page:
Allow: /?p=1 Disallow: /?p=*
The thing I don't have the answer to, is if this will work by first allowing the page 1, and then blocking all others. I don't have a method for this in blocking via robots as this is normally handed with other solutions you mention.
You can try it though through Webmaster tools:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- Under Crawl, click Blocked URLs.
- If it's not already selected, click the** Test robots.txt** tab.
- Copy the content of your robots.txt file, and paste it into the first box.
- In the URLs box, list the site to test against.
- In the User-agents list, select the user-agents you want.
-Andy
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
-
Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt
Hi Everybody, We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring: Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/" Color - For example: ?color=91 Price - For example: "?price=650-700" Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704" Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/" My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled? Any advice would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | centurysafety0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Help with Robots.txt On a Shared Root
Hi, I posted a similar question last week asking about subdomains but a couple of complications have arisen. Two different websites I am looking after share the same root domain which means that they will have to share the same robots.txt. Does anybody have suggestions to separate the two on the same file without complications? It's a tricky one. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Google Indexing Duplicate URLs : Ignoring Robots & Canonical Tags
Hi Moz Community, We have the following robots command that should prevent URLs with tracking parameters being indexed. Disallow: /*? We have noticed google has started indexing pages that are using tracking parameters. Example below. http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html?ec=affee77a60fe4867 These pages are identified as duplicate content yet have the correct canonical tags: https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&gs_l=hp.3..0i10j0l9.4201.5461.0.5879.8.8.0.0.0.0.82.376.7.7.0....0...1c.1.58.hp..3.5.268.0.JTW91YEkjh4 With various affiliate feeds available for our site, we effectively have duplicate versions of every page due to the tracking query that Google seems to be willing to index, ignoring both robots rules & canonical tags. Can anyone shed any light onto the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Issue with Robots.txt file blocking meta description
Hi, Can you please tell me why the following error is showing up in the serps for a website that was just re-launched 7 days ago with new pages (301 redirects are built in)? A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. Once we noticed it yesterday, we made some changed to the file and removed the amount of items in the disallow list. Here is the current Robots.txt file: # XML Sitemap & Google News Feeds version 4.2 - http://status301.net/wordpress-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/ Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap-news.xml User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Other notes... the site was developed in WordPress and uses that followign plugins: WooCommerce All-in-One SEO Pack Google Analytics for WordPress XML Sitemap Google News Feeds Currently, in the SERPs, it keeps jumping back and forth between showing the meta description for the www domain and showing the error message (above). Originally, WP Super Cache was installed and has since been deactivated, removed from WP-config.php and deleted permanently. One other thing to note, we noticed yesterday that there was an old xml sitemap still on file, which we have since removed and resubmitted a new one via WMT. Also, the old pages are still showing up in the SERPs. Could it just be that this will take time, to review the new sitemap and re-index the new site? If so, what kind of timeframes are you seeing these days for the new pages to show up in SERPs? Days, weeks? Thanks, Erin ```
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiddenPeak0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt
Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links. While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google. For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do? Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed. Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY1