Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
-
Hi
I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google.
Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!!
Thanks
-
Thanks again AL123al!
I would be concerned about my internal linking because of this problem. I've always wanted to keep important pages within 3 clicks of the Homepage. My worry here is that while these products can get clicked by a user within 3 clicks of the Homepage, they're blocked to Googlebot.
So the product URLS are only getting crawled in the sitemap, which would be hugely ineffcient? So I think I have to decide whether opening up these pages will improve my linking structure for Google to crawl the product pages, but is that important than increasing the amount of pages it's able to crawl and wasting crawl budget?
-
Hello,
The canonical product URLS will be getting crawled just fine as they are not blocked in the robots.txt. Without understanding your problem completely, I think the guys before you were trying to stop all the duplicate URLS with parameters being crawled and just leaving Google to crawl the canonicals - which is what you want.
If you remove the parameter from robots.txt then Google will crawl everything including the parameter URLS. This will waste crawl budget. So better that Google is only crawling the canonicals.
Regarding the sitemap, being present on the sitemap will help Googlebot decide what to prioritise crawling but won't stop it finding other URLS if there is good internal linking.
-
Thanks AL123al! The base URL's (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes) do seem to be getting crawled here & there, and some are ranking which is great. But I think the only place they can get crawled is the sitemap, which has has over 28,000 URLs on one page (another thing I need to fix)!
So if Googlebot gets to the parameter URL through category pages (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid...) and sees it's blocked, I'm guessing it can't see it's important to us (from the website hierarchy) or the canonical tag, so I'm presuming it's seriously damaging or power in getting products ranked
In Screaming Frog, 112,000 get crawled and 68% are blocked by robots. 17,000 are URL's which contain "?cgid", which I don't think is too big for Googlebot to crawl, the websites has a pretty good authority so I think we have a pretty deep crawl.
So I suppose what really want to know is will removing "?cgid" from the robots file really damage the site? I my opinion, I think it'll really help
-
This looks like the products are being appended by a parameter ?cgid - there may be other stuff attached to the end of each URL like this below:
e.g. www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid-product=19&controller=product etc
but canonical URL is www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes
These products may have had a canonical to the base URL which means that there won't be any problem with duplicates being indexed. So all well and good.
Except.....Google has to crawl each of these parameter URLs to find the canonical. In a huge website this means that crawl budget is being consumed by unnecessary crawling of these parameterised URLs.
You can tell Google not to crawl the parameter URLs in search console (at least in the old version you can). But you can also stop Google crawling these URLS unnecessarily by blocking them in robots txt if you are sure that the parameters are not changing how the page is looking in search.
So long story short is that is why you may see that the URLS with parameters are being blocked in robots.txt. The canonical version URLS will be getting crawled just fine since they don't have any parameters and hence not being blocked.
Hope that makes sense?
-
Yes, it's in the robot.txt, that's the problem. Someone had to physically put it in there, but I've no idea why they would.
-
Did you check your robot txt file? Or check if any plugin creating this problem.
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
-
How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!
Web Design | | xpers0 -
No-index part of page
Hi All, I want to copy articles from CNN/Bloomberg/etc and I want to show the content to my users in Lightbox (CSS), but the problem is duplicate content. Do you have any idea how can I no-index part of page/content?
Web Design | | JohnPalmer0 -
Our on page blog is off page! What?
Hi Moz Community, I have a customer who has a blog that is FULL of great unique content however the blog resides at a URL that differs from the main site. Eg. blog.mywebsite.com Instead of www.mywebsite.com/blog . With the latest Google updates I fear that this may be hurting our web ranking. In addition the web blog is a carbon copy of the main URL. My Question: I am going to schedule a meeting with the web designers, How vociferously should I argue for having them move the blog onsite and write 301 redirects for the current blog site?
Web Design | | CKerr0 -
Help with Schema.org on Ecommerce Products
I’m looking for ways of using schema.org with products that have pricing options. There appear to be two main problems 1) Whilst colour, width, height and depth are all catered for, size appears to be missing – how can we mark up products that are available in sizes that aren’t necessarily covered by width/height/depth (e.g. shoe size). Also, what if the product is available in different finishes – technically, these could not properly be described as colours so how could we mark them up? 2) There doesn’t seem to be any particularly good way of marking up pricing options that are displayed on the same product detail page. For e.g. if a pricing option table is used like this: | ID | Colour | Price 001-red | Red | £3.99 001-green | Green | £4.49 001-blue | Blue | £4.99 | I can mark up each row as an offer, and give each offer a price and sku or mpn, but then I can’t use itemprop=”color” to describe exactly what the option is. Would I just use itemprop=”name” in this case and abandon color altogether (even though it’s technically supposed to be describing the colour of the product and not the name of the offer)? I suppose another way I could approach it would be to mark up each row as an individual product, and assign each one an offer with the details as described above but then the containing page would effectively look like a separate product – which it isn’t. Any help or advice on this would be very much appreciated
Web Design | | paulbaguley0 -
Attachment Pages
i have hundreds/thousands of images on my site, but for some reason the images on this page - http://indigocarhire.co.uk/top-of-the-range-car-hire/ - are being flagged as attachment pages, meaning im getting errors for duplicate titles, missing metas ect why are these images and only these ones being flagged up, they have been added in exactly the same way as every other image on the site appreciate any advice Thanks
Web Design | | RGOnline0 -
How to provide product information without duplicate content?
Hi all, I have an ecommerce website with approx 400 products, these are quite technical products and i use to have helpful information about the products on the product pages... My SEO company told me to remove all this, as i had lots of duplicate content issues... I have since had content writers re-write all product descriptions (about 250 words per product)... and now i am trying to figure out a way of getting the "helpful" information back on but in some kind of dynamic way... There is basically about 5 or 6 blocks of information, that can be added to each product page, these overlap hundreds of products. i was thinking of perhaps creating a separate static page for each block of useful information, and putting links on the product pages to this... however, ideally i would prefer to not keep sending customers to other pages... so wanted to see if others had come across similar issues themselves and how they went about having this "content" available to the user but in such a way it was not duplicate content... Please note using images would not be any good here, as the content varies in size but most of it is text based... regards James
Web Design | | isntworkdull1 -
I have a button that repeats it self many times on same page, what can i do so button name does not affect my SEO?
I have a shopping car button named "Add to car" but it repeats on many pages on my website, is this affecting my seo? If yes.. What should i do so it does not affect? Should button appear on hover? Thanks
Web Design | | SeMeAntoja0