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.
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
-
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google.
Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS.
They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index?
We don't want these pages to be found.
-
That's why I mentioned: "eventually". But thanks for the added information. Hopefully it's clear now for the original poster.
-
Looking at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0&feature=youtu.be Matt Cutts advises to use the noindex tag on every individual page. However, this is very time consuming if you're dealing wit a large volume of pages.
The other option he recommends is to use the robots.txt file as well as the URL removal tool in GWMT, Although this is the second choice option, it does seem easier for us to implement than the noindex tag.
-
Hi,
Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.
-
Hi Nico
Great response thanks.
This is certainly something I'm taking into consideration and will question my developer about this.
-
Thanks Thomas.
I'm now finding out from my developer is we are able to noindex these pages with the meta robots.
If this is something that isn't possible, it's likely that we'll add to the robots.txt as you did.
Either way I think will be progress to different degrees.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
Completely agree, I have done the same for a website I am doing work with, ideally we would noindex with meta robots however that isn't possible. So instead we added to the robots.txt, the number of indexed pages have dropped, yet when you search exactly it just says the description can't be reached.
So I was happy with the results as they're now not ranking for the terms they were.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.
The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...
At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.
So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)
Regards
Nico
-
Thanks Martijn. This is what I was assuming would happen. However, I got a confusing message from my developer which said the following,
"won't remove the URL's from the index but it will mean that they will only show up for very specific searches that customers are extremely unlikely to use. It will also increase Asgard's crawl budget as Google and Bing won't try to crawl these URLs. Would you be happy with this solution?"
I would tend to still agree with your statement though.
-
Yes they will be eventually. As you disallow Google to crawl the URLs it will probably start hiding the descriptions for some of these image pages soon as they can't crawl them anymore. Then at some point they'll stop looking at them at all.
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
-
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
Hi Mozzers, My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad 🙂 My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc. I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like: example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdrama231
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va OR example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it. Thoughts? Thank you!!0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0