To block with robots.txt or canonicalize?
-
I'm working with an apt community with a large number of communities across the US. I'm running into dup content issues where each community will have a page such as "amenities" or "community-programs", etc that are nearly identical (if not exactly identical) across all communities.
I'm wondering if there are any thoughts on the best way to tackle this. The two scenarios I came up with so far are:
Is it better for me to select the community page with the most authority and put a canonical on all other community pages pointing to that authoritative page?
or
Should i just remove the directory all-together via robots.txt to help keep the site lean and keep low quality content from impacting the site from a panda perspective?
Is there an alternative I'm missing?
-
I think the canonical idea is better than blocking the pages all together. Depending on how the site is laid out you may try and make the pages more specific to location being talked about. Maybe adding header tags with the location information as well as adding that info to the page title and meta-description. If it is not too time consuming, I'd try and make those pages more unique especially since you might be getting searches based on a location. Location specific pages may help in that regard.
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
-
Robots.txt blocking Moz
Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites. But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems. We have never come up against this before, even with this site. Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error. Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please? http://www.wychwoodflooring.com -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Htaccess and robots.txt and 902 error
Hi this is my first question in here I truly hope someone will be able to help. It's quite a detailed problem and I'd love to be able to fix it through your kind help. It regards htaccess files and robot.txt files and 902 errors. In October I created a WordPress website from what was previously a non-WordPress site it was quite dated. I had built the new site on a sub-domain I created on the existing site so that the live site could remain live whilst I created on the subdomain. The site I built on the subdomain is now live but I am concerned about the existence of the old htaccess files and robots txt files and wonder if I should just delete the old ones to leave the just the new on the new site. I created new htaccess and robots.txt files on the new site and have left the old htaccess files there. Just to mention that all the old content files are still sat on the server under a folder called 'old files' so I am assuming that these aren't affecting matters. I access the htaccess and robots.txt files by clicking on 'public html' via ftp I did a Moz crawl and was astonished to 902 network error saying that it wasn't possible to crawl the site, but then I was alerted by Moz later on to say that the report was ready..I see 641 crawl errors ( 449 medium priority | 192 high priority | Zero low priority ). Please see attached image. Each of the errors seems to have status code 200; this seems to be applying to mainly the images on each of the pages: eg domain.com/imagename . The new website is built around the 907 Theme which has some page sections on the home page, and parallax sections on the home page and throughout the site. To my knowledge the content and the images on the pages are not duplicated because I have made each page as unique and original as possible. The report says 190 pages have been duplicated so I have no clue how this can be or how to approach fixing this. Since October when the new site was launched, approx 50% of incoming traffic has dropped off at the home page and that is still the case, but the site still continues to get new traffic according to Google Analytics statistics. However Bing Yahoo and Google show a low level of Indexing and exposure which may be indicative of the search engines having difficulty crawling the site. In Google Analytics in Webmaster Tools, the screen text reports no crawl errors. W3TC is a WordPress caching plugin which I installed just a few days ago to speed up page speed, so I am not querying anything here about W3TC unless someone spots that this might be a problem, but like I said there have been problems re traffic dropping off when visitors arrive on the home page. The Yoast SEO plugin is being used. I have included information about the htaccess and robots.txt files below. The pages on the subdomain are pointing to the live domain as has been explained to me by the person who did the site migration. I'd like the site to be free from pages and files that shouldn't be there and I feel that the site needs a clean up as well as knowing if the robots.txt and htaccess files that are included in the old site should actually be there or if they should be deleted... ok here goes with the information in the files. Site 1) refers to the current website. Site 2) refers to the subdomain. Site 3 refers to the folder that contains all the old files from the old non-WordPress file structure. **************** 1) htaccess on the current site: ********************* BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache <ifmodule mod_deflate.c=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary</ifmodule>
Moz Pro | | SEOguy1
<ifmodule mod_filter.c="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/x-component application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/html text/richtext image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon application/json
<ifmodule mod_mime.c=""># DEFLATE by extension
AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml</ifmodule></ifmodule></ifmodule> END W3TC Browser Cache BEGIN W3TC CDN <filesmatch ".(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css)$"=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"</ifmodule></filesmatch> END W3TC CDN BEGIN W3TC Page Cache core <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_ENC:_gzip]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} w3tc_preview [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_PREVIEW:_preview]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =""
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(comment_author|wp-postpass|w3tc_logged_out|wordpress_logged_in|wptouch_switch_toggle) [NC]
RewriteCond "%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" -f
RewriteRule .* "/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" [L]</ifmodule> END W3TC Page Cache core BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress ....(((I have 7 301 redirects in place for old page url's to link to new page url's))).... #Force non-www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] **************** 1) robots.txt on the current site: ********************* User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://domain.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml **************** 2) htaccess in the subdomain folder: ********************* Switch rewrite engine off in case this was installed under HostPay. RewriteEngine Off SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 53 DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.php BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /WPnewsiteDee/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /subdomain/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress **************** 2) robots.txt in the subdomain folder: ********************* this robots.txt file is empty **************** 3) htaccess in the Old Site folder: ********************* Deny from all *************** 3) robots.txt in the Old Site folder: ********************* User-agent: *
Disallow: / I have tried to be thorough so please excuse the length of my message here. I really hope one of you great people in the Moz community can help me with a solution. I have SEO knowledge I love SEO but I have not come across this before and I really don't know where to start with this one. Best Regards to you all and thank you for reading this. moz-site-crawl-report-image_zpsirfaelgm.jpg0 -
Website blocked by Robots.txt in OSE
When viewing my client's website in OSE under the Top Pages tab, it shows that ALL pages are blocked by Robots.txt. This is extremely concerning because Google Webmaster Tools is showing me that all pages are indexed and OK. No crawl errors, no messages, no nothing. I did a "site:website.com" in Google and all of the pages of the website returned. Any thoughts? Where is OSE picking up this signal? I cannot find a blocked robots tag in the code or anything.
Moz Pro | | ConnellyPartners0 -
What is the correct htaccess code for Canonicalization?
I've been working on a clients site and put up the following but when I check back on seomoz i have over 3000 errors and notices and its been crawling a silly amount of pages that don't exist!! ErrorDocument 404 /404.html Options +FollowSymLinksDirectoryIndex index.html RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/ [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.html [L]
Moz Pro | | SeoSheikh0 -
Linking C Blocks - SEOMoz says its a good thing?
In the competitve analysis, one competitor have more Linking C Blocks, Seomoz has a tick by it almost like its a better thing. Surely a site with the same administrative relationship is not going to help you as much from a linking point of view.
Moz Pro | | sanchez19600 -
Does the SEOMoz weekly crawl that highlights no meta description tag, take into account if there is a meta robots noindex,follow tag on the pages it indicates the missing meta descriptions?
The weekly crawl website report is telling me that there are pages that have missing meta description tags, yet I've implemented meta robots tags to 'noindex, follow' those pages which are visible in those page source files. As far as Google Is concerned, surely this then won't be a problem since it is being instructed NOT to consider these specific pages for indexing. I am assuming that the weekly SEOmoz website crawl is simply throwing the missing meta description crawl findings into its report without itself observing that the particluar URL references contain the meta robots 'noindex,follow' tag ???? Appreciate if you can clairfy if this is the case. It would help me understand that (at least in terms of my efforts towards Google) your own crawl doesn't observe the meta robots tag instruction, hence the resultant report's flagging the discrepancy.
Moz Pro | | callassist0 -
Rogerbot Ignoring Robots.txt?
Hi guys, We're trying to block Rogerbot from spending 8000-9000 of our 10000 pages per week for our site crawl on our zillions of PhotoGallery.asp pages. Unfortunately our e-commerce CMS isn't tremendously flexible so the only way we believe we can block rogerbot is in our robots.txt file. Rogerbot keeps crawling all these PhotoGallery.asp pages so it's making our crawl diagnostics really useless. I've contacted the SEOMoz support staff and they claim the problem is on our side. This is the robots.txt we are using: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow:/PhotoGallery.asp Disallow:/pindex.asp Disallow:/help.asp Disallow:/kb.asp Disallow:/ReviewNew.asp User-agent: * Disallow:/cgi-bin/ Disallow:/myaccount.asp Disallow:/WishList.asp Disallow:/CFreeDiamondSearch.asp Disallow:/DiamondDetails.asp Disallow:/ShoppingCart.asp Disallow:/one-page-checkout.asp Sitemap: http://store.jrdunn.com/sitemap.xml For some reason the Wysiwyg edit is entering extra spaces but those are all single spaced. Any suggestions? The only other thing I thought of to try is to something like "Disallow:/PhotoGallery.asp*" with a wildcard.
Moz Pro | | kellydallen0 -
Blocking all robots except rogerbot
I'm in the process of working with a site under development and wish to run the SEOmoz crawl test before we launch it publicly. Unfortunately rogerbot is reluctant to crawl the site. I've set my robots.txt to disallow all bots besides rogerbot. Currently looks like this: User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: All pages within the site are meta tagged index,follow. Crawl report says: Search Engine blocked by robots.txt Yes Am I missing something here?
Moz Pro | | ignician0