Using folder blocked by robots.txt before uploaded to indexed folder - is that OK?
-
I have a folder "testing" within my domain which is a folder added to the robots.txt. My web developers use that folder "testing" when we are creating new content before uploading to an indexed folder. So the content is uploaded to the "testing" folder at first (which is blocked by robots.txt) and later uploaded to an indexed folder, yet permanently keeping the content in the "testing" folder. Actually, my entire website's content is located within the "testing" - so same URL structure for all pages as indexed pages, except it starts with the "testing/" folder.
Question: even though the "testing" folder will not be indexed by search engines, is there a chance search engines notice that the content is at first uploaded to the "testing" folder and therefore the indexed folder is not guaranteed to get the content credit, since search engines see the content in the "testing" folder, despite the "testing" folder being blocked by robots.txt? Would it be better that I password protecting this "testing" folder?
Thx
-
good observation....
-
Yep, just to jump in on the above, if a competitor is paying attention to your robots.txt file, they might notice a sweet stash of content under the /testing folder that they can nab. I have actually seen something similar happen in the past in a competitive SEO niche, so something to bear in mind.
-
As long as the correct robots.txt setting has been applied to the /testing folder, then you do not have anything to worry about.
Considering that it is a staging environment, I would recommend securing it with a password just to be safe and secure with your non-production site content.
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 happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
Indexing is live what about rankings ?
I noticed that when I request indexing in the webmaster tool my new content is live within minutes. Does it take longer to update the ranking or is the ranking updated as soon as the new page has been indexed. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How do the Quoras of this world index their content?
I am helping a client index lots and lots of pages, more than one million pages. They can be seen as questions on Quora. In the Quora case, users are often looking for the answer on a specific question, nothing else. On Quora there is a structure setup on the homepage to let the spiders in. But I think mostly it is done with a lot of sitemaps and internal linking in relevancy terms and nothing else... Correct? Or am I missing something? I am going to index about a million question and answers, just like Quora. Now I have a hard time dealing with structuring these questions without just doing it for the search engines. Because nobody cares about structuring these questions. The user is interested in related questions and/or popular questions, so I want to structure them in that way too. This way every question page will be in the sitemap, but not all questions will have links from other question pages linking to them. These questions are super longtail and the idea is that when somebody searches this exact question we can supply them with the answer (onpage will be perfectly optimised for people searching this question). Competition is super low because it is all unique user generated content. I think best is just to put them in sitemaps and use an internal linking algorithm to make the popular and related questions rank better. I could even make sure every question has at least one other page linking to it, thoughts? Moz, do you think when publishing one million pages with quality Q/A pages, this strategy is enough to index them and to rank for the question searches? Or do I need to design a structure around it so it will all be crawled and each question will also receive at least one link from a "category" page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freek270 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Magento Store Using Z-Blocks - Impact on SEO?
Hi Guys, I have a question relating to Z-Blocks in Magento. Our Magento store uses a lot of Z-Blocks, these are bits of content that are switched off and on depending on a customer’s user group. This allows us to target different offers and content to new customers (not logged in) and existing customers (logged in). Does anyone have any experience in how this impacts SEO? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Trouble Indexing one of our sitemaps
Hi everyone thanks for your help. Any feedback is appreciated. We have three separate sitemaps: blog/sitemap.xml events.xml sitemap.xml Unfortunately we keep trying to get our events sitemap to pickup and it just isn't happening for us. Any input on what could be going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TicketCity0 -
Appropriate use of rel canonical
Hey Guys,I'm a bit stuck. My on-page grade indicated the following two issues and I need to find how how to fix both issues.If you have a solution, could you please let me know how to address these issues? It's all a bit intimidating at the moment!!Thank you so much..****************************************************************************************************************************************Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag. Recommendation: Remove all but a single canonical URL tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StoryScout1 -
To remove from index or not and stop words
Each product is an item of jewellery based on a letter of the alphabet. At present all 26 are indexed but as you guess they all share the same description, title and URL (apart from change in letter). What I was going to do was set all but one to no-index, recreate new descriptions and revert back to index. But then that got me thinking - through stop words will the titles be seen as duplicates: letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0