SSL and robots.txt question - confused by Google guidelines
-
I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?
-
Hi Luke,
Just make sure that your robots.txt file located at https://www.example.com/robots.txt doesn't block search engine spiders. Of course there may be some folders or filetypes you want to block but it certainly shouldn't look like below which would block everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Hope that helps
-
No that's not what they mean - it means Google recommends you allow the secure version of your site(where applicable) to be crawled. You can still block certain pages/sections should you choose to do so.
With regards to noindexing you could also place this on the actual page as an alternative.
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
-
Google Indexing
Hi We have roughly 8500 pages in our website. Google had indexed almost 6000 of them, but now suddenly I see that the pages indexed has gone to 45. Any possible explanations why this might be happening and what can be done for it. Thanks, Priyam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
Google News error in Google Search Console
My google search console states some errors as below: 1. Article fragmented Some of the urls in this error are the category urls. How to make google bot understand it is a category not an article? 2. Article too short In fact the article is quite long. I do not know why this is happen... 3. No sentence found In fact, there are a lot of sentences Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Meta canonical or simply robots.txt other domain names with same content?
Hi, I'm working with a new client who has a main product website. This client has representatives who also sells the same products but all those reps have a copy of the same website on another domain name. The best thing would probably be to shut down the other (same) websites and redirect 301 them to the main, but that's impossible in the minding of the client. First choice : Implement a conical meta for all the URL on all the other domain names. Second choice : Robots.txt with disallow for all the other websites. Third choice : I'm really open to other suggestions 😉 Thank you very much! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Rank on specific Google
Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Another deduplication question.
Where an existing website has duplicate content issues - specifically the www. and non-www. type; what is the most effective way to inform the searchers and spiders that there is only one page? I have a site where the ecommerce software (Shopfitter 4) allows a fair bit of meta data to be inserted into each product page but I am uncertain, after a couple of attempts to deduplicate some pages, which is the most effective way to ensure that the www related duplication is eliminated sitewide - there is such a solution. I have to own up to having looked at ,htaccess 301 redirects webmaster tools and become increasingly bamboozled by the conflicting advice as to which is the most effective way or combination to get rid of this problem. too olod to learn new tricks I reckon 😉 Your help and clarification would be appreciated as this may help head off more fruitless work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SkiBum0