Blocking https from being crawled
-
I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue
www.example.com will be my domain
In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login
If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff?
The redirect part is what I am questioning.
-
Correct once /login gets redirected to https://www.example.com/login all nav links etc are https
What I ended up doing was blocking /login in robots and now doing canonicals on https as well as nofollow the /login link that is in the nav that redirects
Willl see what happens now.
-
So, the "/login" page gets redirected to https: and then every link on that page goes secure and Google crawls them all? I think blocking the "/login" page is a perfectly good way to go here - cut the crawl path, and you'll cut most of the problem.
You could request removal of "/login" in Google Webmaster Tools, too. Sometimes, I find that Robots.txt isn't great at removing pages that are already indexed. I would definitely add the canonical as well, if it's feasible. Cutting the path may not cut the pages that have already been indexed with https:.
Sorry, I'd actually reverse that:
(1) Add the canonicals, and let Google sweep up the duplicates
(2) A few weeks later, block the "/login" page
Sounds counter-intuitive, but if you block the crawl path to the https: pages first, then Google won't crawl the canonical tags on those versions. Use canonical to clean up the index, and then block the page to prevent future problems.
-
Gotcha. Yea I commented above how I was going to add a canonical as well as a noindex in the meta but was curious how it handled the redirect that was happening.
thanks for your help
-
Yea I was going to nofollow the link in the nav and add a meta tag but was curious how the robots file would handle this since the url is a redirect.
Thanks for your input
-
The pages that are being crawled under https, are the same pages available under http as well ? If yes, can you just add a canonical tag on these pages to go to the http version. That should fix it. And if your login page is the entry point, your fix will help as well. But then as Rebekah said, what if somebody is linking to your https page. I would suggest you look into making a canonical tag on these pages to http if that makes sense and is doable.
-
You can disallow the https portion in robots.txt, but remember robots.txt isn't always a sure fire way of not getting an area of your site crawled. If you have other important content to crawl from the secured page, be careful you are not blocking robots from there.
If this is linked to other places on the web, and the link doesn't include no-follow, search engines may still crawl the page. Can you change the link in your navigation to no-follow as well? I would also add a meta noindex tag to the page itself, and a canonical tag to the https version.
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
-
Why does Bing bot crawl so aggressively?
We observer that the Bing bot is crawling our site very aggressively. We set Bing's crawl control so that it should not crawl us during heavy traffic hours, but that did not change a thing. Does anyone have the problem and even better a solution?
Technical SEO | | Roverandom1 -
Which Sitemap to keep - Http or https (or both)
Hi, Just finished upgrading my site to the ssl version (like so many other webmasters now that it may be a ranking factor). FIxed all links, CDN links are now secure, etc and 301 Redirected all pages from http to https. Changed property in Google Analytics from http to https and added https version in Webmaster Tools. So far, so good. Now the question is should I add the https version of the sitemap in the new HTTPS site in webmasters or retain the existing http one? Ideally switching over completely to https version by adding a new sitemap would make more sense as the http version of the sitemap would anyways now be re-directed to HTTPS. But the last thing i can is to get penalized for duplicate content. Could you please suggest as I am still a rookie in this department. If I should add the https sitemap version in the new site, should i delete the old http one or no harm retaining it.
Technical SEO | | ashishb010 -
404s effecting crawl rate?
We made a change to our site where we all of a sudden we are creating a large number of 404 pages. Is this effecting the crawl/indexing rate? Currently we've submitted 3.4 million pages, have over 834K indexed but have over and 330K pages not found. Since the large increase in 404s we've noticed a decrease in pages crawled per day. I found this Q & A in Webmasters (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html) but it seems like the 404s should not have an effect. Is this article out of date? What do you think fellow Moz-ers? Is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Why blocking a subfolder dropped indexed pages with 10%?
Hy Guys, maybe you can help me to understand better: on 17.04 I had 7600 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 6113). I have included in the robots.txt file, Disallow: /account/ - which contains the registration page, wishlist, etc. and other stuff since I'm not interested to rank with registration form. on 23.04 I had 6980 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 5985). I understand that this way I'm telling google I don't want that section indexed, by way so manny pages?, Because of the faceted navigation? Cheers
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
Matching C Block
Hi Guys We have 2 sites that are in the same niche and competing for the same keywords. The sites are on seperate domains one is UK and one is .com They have their own IP's however have both have the same C Block... We have noticed that when the rankings for one site improves the other drops.... Could the C Block be causing this?
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Crawl reveals hundreds of urls with multiple urls in the url string
The latest crawl of my site revealed hundreds of duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors. When I looked it was from a large number of urls with urls appended to them at the end. For example: http://www.test-site.com/page1.html/page14.html or http://www.test-site.com/page4.html/page12.html/page16.html some of them go on for a hundred characters. I am totally stymied, as are the people at my ISP and the person who talked to me on the phone from SEOMoz. Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks So much for any help you can offer! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Crawl Tool Producing Random URL's
For some reason SEOmoz's crawl tool is returning duplicate content URL's that don't exist on my website. It is returning pages like "mydomain.com/pages/pages/pages/pages/pages/pricing" Nothing like that exists as a URL on my website. Has anyone experienced something similar to this, know what's causing it, or know how I can fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0