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
-
Question about robots file on mobile devices
Hi We have a robots.txt file, but do I need to create a separate file for the m.site or can I just add the line into my normal robots file. Ive just read the Google Guidelines (what a great read it was) and couldn't find my answer. Thanks in Advance Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Using Meta Header vs Robots.txt
Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?
Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Google showing high volume of URLs blocked by robots.txt in in index-should we be concerned?
if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site). And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Will blocking urls in robots.txt void out any backlink benefits? - I'll explain...
Ok... So I add tracking parameters to some of my social media campaigns but block those parameters via robots.txt. This helps avoid duplicate content issues (Yes, I do also have correct canonical tags added)... but my question is -- Does this cause me to miss out on any backlink magic coming my way from these articles, posts or links? Example url: www.mysite.com/subject/?tracking-info-goes-here-1234 Canonical tag is: www.mysite.com/subject/ I'm blocking anything with "?tracking-info-goes-here" via robots.txt The url with the tracking info of course IS NOT indexed in Google but IT IS indexed without the tracking parameters. What are your thoughts? Should I nix the robots.txt stuff since I already have the canonical tag in place? Do you think I'm getting the backlink "juice" from all the links with the tracking parameter? What would you do? Why? Are you sure? 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AubieJon0 -
1200 pages no followed and blocked by robots on my site. Is that normal?
Hi, I've got a bunch of notices saying almost 1200 pages are no-followed and blocked by robots. They appear to be comments and other random pages. Not the actual domain and static content pages. Still seems a little odd. The site is www.jobshadow.com. Any idea why I'd have all these notices? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
New server update + wrong robots.txt = lost SERP rankings
Over the weekend, we updated our store to a new server. Before the switch, we had a robots.txt file on the new server that disallowed its contents from being indexed (we didn't want duplicate pages from both old and new servers). When we finally made the switch, we somehow forgot to remove that robots.txt file, so the new pages weren't indexed. We quickly put our good robots.txt in place, and we submitted a request for a re-crawl of the site. The problem is that many of our search rankings have changed. We were ranking #2 for some keywords, and now we're not showing up at all. Is there anything we can do? Google Webmaster Tools says that the next crawl could take up to weeks! Any suggestions will be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9Studios0 -
Why specify robots instead of googlebot for a Panda affected site?
Daniweb is the poster child for sites that have recovered from Panda. I know one strategy she mentioned was de-indexing all of her tagged content, fo rexample: http://www.daniweb.com/tags/database Why do you think more Panda affected sites specifying 'googlebot' rather than 'robots' to capture traffic from Bing & Yahoo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0