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.
Blocking Standard pages with Robots.txt (t&c's, shipping policy, pricing & privacy policies etc)
-
Hi
I've just had best practice site migration completed for my old e-commerce store into a Shopify environment and I see in GSC that it's reporting my standard pages as blocked by robots.txt, such as these below examples. Surely I don't want these blocked ? is that likely due to my migrators or s defaults setting with Shopify does anyone know? :
t&c's
shipping policy
pricing policy
privacy policy
etc
So in summary:
-
Shall I unblock these?
-
What caused it Shopify default settings or more likely my migration team?
All Best
Dan
-
-
Thanks for your advice Alex, yes i agree, will ask Shopify if this was them (re default settings) or if my migrators have been over enthusiastic but contrary to best practices.
Have a great BH weekend !
All Best
Dan
-
I wouldn't block them. While it's unlikely to affect the rank of your other pages, it may result in a poorer user experience, e.g. if someone were to be searching for one of your policies in Google, it would not be returned.
I'm afraid I'm not an expert on Shopify at all, so I can't answer why they wouldn't have been blocked.
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
-
Rogerbot directives in robots.txt
I feel like I spend a lot of time setting false positives in my reports to ignore. Can I prevent Rogerbot from crawling pages I don't care about with robots.txt directives? For example., I have some page types with meta noindex and it reports these to me. Theoretically, I can block Rogerbot from these with a robots,txt directive and not have to deal with false positives.
Reporting & Analytics | | awilliams_kingston0 -
How important is Lighthouse page speed measurement?
Hi, Many experts cite the Lighthouse speed as an important factor for search ranking. It's confusing because several top sites have Lighthouse speed of 30-40, yet they rank well. Also, some sites that load quickly have a low Lighthouse speed score (when I test on mobile/desktop they load much quicker than stated by Lighthouse). When we look at other image rich sites (such as Airbnb, John Deere etc) the Lighthouse score can be 30-40. Our site https://www.equipmentradar.com/ loads quickly on Desktop and Mobile, but the Lighthouse score is similar to Airbnb and so forth. We have many photos similar to photo below, probably 30-40, many of which load async. Should we spend more time optimizing Lighthouse or is it ok? Are large images fine to load async? Thank you, Dave bg_05.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | erdev0 -
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
How to get a list of robots.txt file
This is my site. http://muslim-academy.com/ Its in wordpress.I just want to know is there any way I can get the list of blocked URL by Robots.txt In Google Webmaster its not showing up.Just giving the number of blocked URL's. Any plugin or Software to extract the list of blocked URL's.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
Google Analytics - paid & unpaid visits messed up
I guess Google Analytics messes up my paid and unpaid visits. In the list of top 10 kw's sending non-paid traffic it shows 5 very short kw's that we don't rank for at all (checked with RankTracker - we are not in first 50 search results). But these are the kw's we advertise for... One more proof: Webmaster Tools 'Search queries' shows 10 times less 'Clicks' from organic search than Google Analytics. Is there anyone who is experiencing this kind of problems with GA? Is there anything you can do with it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Alexey_mindvalley0