Google robots.txt test - not picking up syntax errors?
-
I just ran a robots.txt file through "Google robots.txt Tester" as there was some unusual syntax in the file that didn't make any sense to me...
e.g. /url/?*
/url/?
/url/*and so on. I would use ? and not ? for example and what is ? for! - etc.
Yet "Google robots.txt Tester" did not highlight the issues...
I then fed the sitemap through http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-tester/robots-checker.php and that tool actually picked up my concerns.
Can anybody explain why Google didn't - or perhaps it isn't supposed to pick up such errors?
Thanks, Luke
-
Many thanks Beau - much appreciated.
-
Hey Luke,
It appears that in each of the three examples, there was a plausible case for each example. Let's cover each:
- For /url/?* , it can be expressed that a URL can offer a trailing slash and then a query string, see examples here.
- with /url/? , this covers examples of the above and in addition, would plausibly block product pages that generate query strings, similar to this example from H&M. In essence, only allowing the product page to be seen.
- /url/* , well, that's just anything and everything after the trailing slash.
I guess the question you should ask yourself is "Is this the best approach for the issue?"
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 Webmaster tools -Fixing over 20,000+ crawl errors
Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
How to leverage Google Images?
My Google search rankings are improving rapidly at the moment, but a lot of my rankings are for images (presume that means the images are appearing near the top in Google Images). How do I capitalise on that? It's not really much help to me that my images are popular unless it results in traffic to the pages where those images are used. I am running Wordpress so I have the option to have images embed as "no link", "link to attachment page", "link to original image", etc. Is there any advantage of using one of these over the other? I'd really like to set it up so that when a Google Images user clicks "View Image" it loads the attachment page or the host content page rather than the image. Bad SEO? I'm not sure if the fact that I'm using Jetpack Photon CDN image hosting will make this more complicated or not. Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Google is not honoring my descriptions
I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants. This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages. An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ... Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both. I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly. What can I do to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Updating Titles - How long do you wait for Google to pick it up... any tips?
Hi We recently trialed some new page titles which seriously helped our CTR on serps, so we thought we would roll them backwards to our other product pages, only about 5% of the SERPS show the new titles. Do I need to change more on the page to get google to notice these changes?Or just hold on and wait?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Error 403
Hi SEOmoz community, Today, I checked the google webmaster tool of one of my clients, and ithere are 18 403 errors, I was wondering on how to fix those since it is the first time I come across these errors? How can I avoid that in the future? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Page Rank Dead?
Does PR still work? I have sites that have PR3 and get almost no traffic and sites that are PR1 and get thousands of uniques per month. My PR on my main sites haven't moved for about 7 years, even though we've grown significantly. I know lots of you are going to jump in with get the MOZ toolbar, which I already have done, and I agree, it's great ... But can anyone tell me about what's going on with Google PR? Is it still active? Or has Google abandoned? I noticed that the Google toolbar is not even available for Google Chrome. That should say something ... If you like this question, do me a favor, and give me a THUMBS UP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold2 -
Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file
I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it? So something like /_Q1. Will that pickup and block every URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1. So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo1234560