Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
-
Hello!
Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future.
I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt:
User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0My questions:
1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact?
2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?)
I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there.
Thank you for your help!
-
Hello!
Thanks a lot for your feedback and clearing this out! It worked well.
The robots.txt tester is a good tip!
Thanks!
-
Hi,
What you have there will work absolutely fine with a little tweak. And no need to leave spaces between lines.
Disallow: /numberOfStars=0
However, no need to add the wildcard at the end if there is nothing more after that.
The best way to test what works, is before you go and add it to live, use the Robots.txt test tool in Search Console (Webmaster Tools), add in the lines above and then check to make sure none of your other pages are blocked. They won't be, but it's a great way to test before going live.
I hope this helps
-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
-
Robots.txt blocking Moz
Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites. But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems. We have never come up against this before, even with this site. Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error. Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please? http://www.wychwoodflooring.com -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Youtube traffic page url referral
Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?
Moz Pro | | xeonet320 -
What to do with a site of >50,000 pages vs. crawl limit?
What happens if you have a site in your Moz Pro campaign that has more than 50,000 pages? Would it be better to choose a sub-folder of the site to get a thorough look at that sub-folder? I have a few different large government websites that I'm tracking to see how they are fairing in rankings and SEO. They are not my own websites. I want to see how these agencies are doing compared to what the public searches for on technical topics and social issues that the agencies manage. I'm an academic looking at science communication. I am in the process of re-setting up my campaigns to get better data than I have been getting -- I am a newbie to SEO and the campaigns I slapped together a few months ago need to be set up better, such as all on the same day, making sure I've set it to include www or not for what ranks, refining my keywords, etc. I am stumped on what to do about the agency websites being really huge, and what all the options are to get good data in light of the 50,000 page crawl limit. Here is an example of what I mean: To see how EPA is doing in searches related to air quality, ideally I'd track all of EPA's web presence. www.epa.gov has 560,000 pages -- if I put in www.epa.gov for a campaign, what happens with the site having so many more pages than the 50,000 crawl limit? What do I miss out on? Can I "trust" what I get? www.epa.gov/air has only 1450 pages, so if I choose this for what I track in a campaign, the crawl will cover that subfolder completely, and I am getting a complete picture of this air-focused sub-folder ... but (1) I'll miss out on air-related pages in other sub-folders of www.epa.gov, and (2) it seems like I have so much of the 50,000-page crawl limit that I'm not using and could be using. (However, maybe that's not quite true - I'd also be tracking other sites as competitors - e.g. non-profits that advocate in air quality, industry air quality sites - and maybe those competitors count towards the 50,000-page crawl limit and would get me up to the limit? How do the competitors you choose figure into the crawl limit?) Any opinions on which I should do in general on this kind of situation? The small sub-folder vs. the full humongous site vs. is there some other way to go here that I'm not thinking of?
Moz Pro | | scienceisrad0 -
Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)
G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO. Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index & Crawl Best Practices when it comes to URLs - uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? any disadvantage using special characters Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. Thanks heaps, Amy
Moz Pro | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Moz Pro vs. Moz Analytics
Beta version has been out for awhile. Curious to know what people think of Moz Analytics. Personally, I'm having a hard time making the switch from Pro to Moz Analytics because I'm so used to the navigation and layout of Pro. What does everyone else think of the new Moz Analytics? Advantages? Disadvantages?
Moz Pro | | EEE31 -
What does moz trust means?
Hi guys Moz toolbar show me my 'mT' of index page of my website is 7.07. Is it good?
Moz Pro | | vahidafshari450 -
Crawlers crawl weird long urls
I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling:
Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | | kdl01