Should you use robots.txt for pages within your site which do not have high quality content or are not contributing a great deal so when Google crawls your site the best performing content has a higher chance of being indexed?
-
I'm really not sure what is best practice for this query?
-
Thank you for your answer John!
-
I would definitely not block these pages. You want to block as few pages as possible.
1. These pages can be used to boost internal links by linking to your important pages.
2. Google crawls thousands of pages...it will likely crawl all your important and unimportant files.
3. You can de-prioritize these page in the XML sitemap, telling the spiders that there are more important pages to crawl.
4. If these are similar pages, then use the URL parameter tool in Search Console to indicate a page might be a filtered version of a more important page.
-
Hi,
Yes you can block such pages in robots.txt. I would also like to let you know that If you don't want to index some pages you can use .
I would go for in your case.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Is it possible to beef up those lower quality pages with better content? If they are important main content pages I would imagine you would want to improve those pages.
However, if you were going to block them I would recommend a tag within the header of those pages.
Hope that helps some.
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
-
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean?
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean? We have added some text in the pages with keywords thats related the page
Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Google dropping pages from SERPs even though indexed and cached. (Shift over to https suspected.)
Anybody know why pages that have previously been indexed - and that are still present in Google's cache - are now not appearing in Google SERPs? All the usual suspects - noindex, robots, duplication filter, 301s - have been ruled out. We shifted our site over from http to https last week and it appears to have started then, although we have also been playing around with our navigation structure a bit too. Here are a few examples... Example 1: Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place SERP (1): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place SERP (2): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Example 2: SERP: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=deaf+center+recount+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- These are pages that have been linked to from our homepage (Moz PA of 68) prominently for days, are present and correct in our sitemap (https://www.normanrecords.com/catalogue_sitemap.xml), have unique content, have decent on-page optimisation, etc. etc. We moved over to https on 11 Aug. There were some initial wobbles (e.g. 301s from normanrecords.com to www.normanrecords.com got caught up in a nasty loop due to the conflicting 301 from http to https) but these were quickly sorted (i.e. spotted and resolved within minutes). There have been some other changes made to the structure of the site (e.g. a reduction in the navigation options) but nothing I know of that would cause pages to drop like this. For the first example (Memory Drawings) we were ranking on the first page right up until this morning and have been receiving Google traffic for it ever since it was added to the site on 4 Aug. Any help very much appreciated! At the very end of my tether / understanding here... Cheers, Nathon
Technical SEO | | nathonraine0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
Robots.txt blocking site or not?
Here is the robots.txt from a client site. Am I reading this right --
Technical SEO | | 540SEO
that the robots.txt is saying to ignore the entire site, but the
#'s are saying to ignore the robots.txt command? See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines: User-Agent: * Disallow: /0 -
Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0