Should I robots block this directory?
-
There's about 43k pages indexed in this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines.
Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory?
ie.
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/
-
Totally agree with Ryan Kent. You should write a paragraph of content that is unique to the company featured. The chart is not unique enough and you will get flagged as having a high ratio of duplicate content. You should also look at all the other SEO elements on this page, understand what keyphrases you are targeting and modify the title, meta and H1 tags.
-
Should I robots block this directory?
I wouldn't.
Robots.txt in general should only be used when there is no other alternate means available to block content. An example is when your site is created by a CMS or e-commerce platform which does not offer the flexibility to noindex individual pages.
By blocking your site's content, you are preventing search engines not only from indexing the pages, but from following any links on those pages. You are restricting the way a crawler can travel on your site, which is generally a bad idea.
Additionally, I would suggest those pages offer value. "Petco salary comparison", "Target wages" and other search queries could generate results for those pages. Those pages contain helpful information which is otherwise not easily found on the internet. If that was my site, I would work to improve the optimization of those pages, not block them.
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
-
URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
Hi Moz community! I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing. Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case: our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx) products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots? For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ... Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!). Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaZylberberg0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Should I switch all paid-for directory backlinks to nofollow backlinks?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
Is our robots.txt file correct?
Could you please review our robots.txt file and let me know if this is correct. www.faithology.com/robots.txt Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Block search bots on staging server
I want to block bots from all of our client sites on our staging server. Since robots.txt files can easily be copied over when moving a site to production, how can i block bots/crawlers from our staging server (at the server level), but still allow our clients to see/preview their site before launch?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueView13010 -
Robots.txt error message in Google Webmaster from a later date than the page was cached, how is that?
I have error messages in Google Webmaster that state that Googlebot encountered errors while attempting to access the robots.txt. The last date that this was reported was on December 25, 2012 (Merry Christmas), but the last cache date was November 16, 2012 (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.etundra.com/robots.txt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). How could I get this error if the page hasn't been cached since November 16, 2012?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770