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
-
Ahrefs vs Moz
Hi! I noticed the Moz DA en the Ahrefs DA are very different. Where https://www.123opzeggen.nl/ has a DA of 10 at MOZ, the DA at Ahrefs is 26. Where does this big difference come from? Do you measure in different ways? I hope you can answer this question for me. Thank you in advance!
Moz Pro | | NaomiAdivare2 -
WEbsite cannot be crawled
I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below: The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place. For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end. _Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _ Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?
Moz Pro | | threecounties0 -
Difference between urls and referring urls?
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx) We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions? What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL? What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer? Appreciate the help.
Moz Pro | | ayrutd1 -
Canonical URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
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 -
Problem crawling a website with age verification page.
Hy every1, Need your help very urgent. I need to crawl a website that first has a page where you need to put your age for verification and after that you are redirected to the website. My problem is that SEOmoz, crawls only that first page, not the whole website. How can I crawl the whole website?, do you need me to upload a link to the website? Thank you very much Catalin
Moz Pro | | catalinmoraru0 -
How to increase page authority
I wonder how to increase the page authority or the domain authority to begin with. It seems you are putting a lot of weight on this in your analysis.
Moz Pro | | wcsinc0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0