Google: How to See URLs Blocked by Robots?
-
Google Webmaster Tools says we have 17K out of 34K URLs that are blocked by our Robots.txt file.
How can I see the URLs that are being blocked?
Here's our Robots.txt file.
User-agent: * Disallow: /swish.cgi Disallow: /demo Disallow: /reviews/review.php/new/ Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/order.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/productsearch.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/billing.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/inv.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/new_options.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/registration.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/tellfriend.cgi Disallow: /*?gdftrk
-
It seems you might be asking two different questions here, Larry.
You ask which URLs are blocked by your robots file. You then answered your own question by listing the entries in your robots file which are the actual URLs that it is blocking.
If in fact what you want to know is which pages exist on your website but are not currently indexed, that's a much bigger question and requires a lot more work to answer.
There is no way Webmaster Tools can give you that answer, because if it was aware of the URL it would already be indexing it.
HOWEVER! It is possible to do it if you are willing to do some of the work on your own to collect and manipulate data using several tools. Essentially, you have to do it in three steps:
- create a list of all the URLs that Google says are indexed. (This info comes from Google's SERPs.)
- then create a separate list of all of the URLs that actually exist on your website. (This must come from a 3rd-party tool you run against your site yourself.)
- From there, you will use Excel to subtract the indexed URLs from the known URLs, leaving a list of non-indexed URLS, which is what you asked for.
I actually laid out this process step-by-step in response to an earlier question, so you can read the process there http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-determine-which-pages-are-not-indexed
Is that what you were looking for?
Paul
-
Okay, well the robots.txt will only be excluding robots from the folders and URLs specified and as I say, there's no way to download a list of all the URLs that Google is not indexing from webmaster tools.
If you have exact URLs in mind which you think might be getting excluded, you can test individual URLs in Google Webmaster Tools in:
Health > Blocked URLs > URLs Specify the URLs and user-agents to test against.
Beyond this, if you want to know if there are URLs that shouldn't be excluded in the folders you have specified, I would run a crawl of your website using SEOMoz' crawl test or Screaming Frog. Then sort the URLs alphabetically and make sure that all of the URLs in the folders you have excluded via robots.txt are ones that you want to exclude.
-
I want to make sure that Google is indexing all of our pages we want them to. I.E. That all of the NOT indexed URLs are valid.
-
Hi Larry
Why do you want to find those URLs out for my understanding? Are you concerned that the robots.txt is blocking URLs it shouldn't be?
As for downloading a list of URLs which aren't indexed from Google Webmaster Tools, which is what I think you would really like, this isn't possible at the moment.
-
Liz; Perhaps my post was unclear or I am misunderstanding your answer.
I want to find out the specific URLs that Google says it isn't indexing because of our Robots.txt file.
-
If you want to see if Google has indexed individual pages which are supposed to be excluded, you can check the URLs in your robots.txt using the site: command.
E.g. type the following into Google:
site:http://www.audiobooksonline.com/swish.cgi
site:http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/new/
...continue for all the URLs in your robots.txtJust from searching on the last example above (site:http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/new/) I can see that you have results indexed. This is probably because you added the robots.txt after it was already indexed.
To get rid of these results you need to take the culprit line out of the robots.txt, add the robots meta tag set to noindex to all pages you want removed, submit a URL removal request via webmaster tools, check it has been nonidexed then you can add the line back into the robots.txt.
This is the tag:
I hope that makes sense and is useful!
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 blocked by pages webmasters tools
a mistake made in software. How can I solve the problem quickly? help me. XTRjH
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mihoreis0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Robots.txt - blocking JavaScript and CSS, best practice for Magento
Hi Mozzers, I'm looking for some feedback regarding best practices for setting up Robots.txt file in Magento. I'm concerned we are blocking bots from crawling essential information for page rank. My main concern comes with blocking JavaScript and CSS, are you supposed to block JavaScript and CSS or not? You can view our robots.txt file here Thanks, Blake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeapOfBelief0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Does Google hate wordpress?
I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow. I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex. Is this the right approach? I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index. I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage. Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateV0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
400 errors and URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools
On our website we do a lot of dynamic resizing of images by using a script which automatically re-sizes an image dependant on paramaters in the URL like: www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?width=100&height=200&cut=false In webmaster tools I have noticed there are a lot of 400 errors on these image Also when I click the URL's listed as causing the errors the URL's are URL Encoded and go to pages like this (this give a bad request): www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D200%26cut%3Dfalse What are your thoughts on what I should do to stop this? I notice in my webmaster tools "URL Parameters" there are parameters for:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
height
width
cut which must be from the Image URLs. These are currently set to "Let Google Decide", but should I change them manually to "Doesn't effect page content"? Thanks in advance0