Robot.txt help
-
Hi,
We have a blog that is killing our SEO.
We need to
Disallow
Disallow: /Blog/?tag*
Disallow: /Blog/?page*
Disallow: /Blog/category/*
Disallow: /Blog/author/*
Disallow: /Blog/archive/*
Disallow: /Blog/Account/.
Disallow: /Blog/search*
Disallow: /Blog/search.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/error404.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/archive*
Disallow: /Blog/archive.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/sitemap.axd
Disallow: /Blog/post.aspxBut Allow everything below /Blog/Post
The disallow list seems to keep growing as we find issues. So rather than adding in to our Robot.txt all the areas to disallow. Is there a way to easily just say Allow /Blog/Post and ignore the rest. How do we do that in Robot.txt
Thanks
-
These: http://screencast.com/t/p120RbUhCT
They appear on every page I looked at, and take up the entire area "above the fold" and the content is "below the fold"
-Dan
-
Thanks Dan, but what grey areas, what url are you looking at?
-
Ahh. I see. You just need to "noindex" the pages you don't want in the index. As far as how to do that with blogengine, I am not sure, as I have never used it before.
But I think a bigger issue is like the giant box areas at the top of every page. They are pushing your content way down. That's definitely hurting UX and making the site a little confusing. I'd suggest improving that as well
-Dan
-
Hi Dan, Yes sorry that's the one!
-
Hi There... that address does not seem to work for me. Should it be .net? http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
-Dan
-
Hi
The blog is www.dotnetblogengine.com
The content is only on the blog once it is just it can be accessed lots of different ways
-
Andrew
I doubt that one thing made your rankings drop so much. Also, what type of CMS are you on? Duplicate content like that should be controlled through indexation for the most part, but I am not recognizing that type of URL structure as any particular CMS?
Are just the title tags duplicate or the entire page content? Essentially, I would either change the content of the pages so they are not duplicate, or if that doesn't make sense I would just "noindex" them.
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
I am getting duplicate content errors in WMT like
This is because tag=ABC and page=1 are both different ways to get to www.mysite.com/Blog/Post/My-Blog-Post.aspx
To fix this I have remove the URL's www.mysite.com/Blog/?tag=ABC and www.mysite.com/Blog/?Page=1from GWMT and by setting robot.txt up like
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/PostI hope to solve the duplicate content issue to stop it happening again.
Since doing this my SERP's have dropped massively. Is what I have done wrong or bad? How would I fix?
Hope this makes sense thanks for you help on this its appreciated.
Andrew
-
Hi There
Where are they appearing in WMT? In crawl errors?
You can also control crawling of parameters within webmaster tools - but I am still not quite sure if you are trying to remove these from the index or just prevent crawling (and if preventing crawling, for what reason?) or both?
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
The issue is my blog had tagging switched on, it cause canonicalization mayhem.
I switched it off, but the tags still appears in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT). I Remove URL via GWMT but they are still appearing. This has also caused me to plummet down the SERPs! I am hoping this is why my SERPs had dropped anyway! I am now trying to get to a point where google just sees my blog posts and not the ?Tag or ?Author or any other parameter that is going to cause me canoncilization pain. In the meantime I am sat waiting for google to bring me back up the SERPs when things settle down but it has been 2 weeks now so maybe something else is up?
-
I'm wondering why you want to block crawling of these URLs - I think what you're going for is to not index them, yes? If you block them from being crawled, they'll remain in the index. I would suggest considering robots meta noindex tags - unless you can describe in a little more detail what the issue is?
-Dan
-
Ok then you should be all set if your tests on GWMT did not indicate any errors.
-
Thanks it goes straight to www.mysite.com/Blog
-
Yup, I understand that you want to see your main site. This is why I recommended blocking only /Blog and not / (your root domain).
However, many blogs have a landing page. Does yours? In other words, when you click on your blog link, does it take you straight to Blog/posts or is there another page in between, eg /Blog/welcome?
If it does not go straight into Blog/posts you would want to also allow the landing page.
Does that make sense?
-
The structure is:
www.mysite.com - want to see everything at this level and below it
www.mysite.com/Blog - want to BLOCK everything at this level
www.mysite.com/Blog/posts - want to see everything at this level and below it
-
Well what Martijn (sorry, I spelled his name wrong before) and I were saying was not to forget to allow the landing page of your blog - otherwise this will not be indexed as you are disallowing the main blog directory.
Do you have a specific landing page for your blog or does it go straight into the /posts directory?
I'd say there's nothing wrong with allowing both Blog/Post and Blog/post just to be on the safe side...honestly not sure about case sensitivity in this instance.
-
"We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-)" What was the essential point you missed. sorry I don't understand. I don;t want to make a mistake in my Robot.txt so would like to be 100% sure on what you are saying
-
Thanks guys so I have
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/Postthat works. My Home page also works. I there anything wrong with including both uppercase "Post" and lowercase "post". It is lowercase on the site but want uppercase "P" just incase. Is there a way to make the entry non case sensitive?
Thanks
-
Correct, Martijin. Good catch!
-
There was a reason that I said he should test this!
We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-). As we know also exclude the robots from crawling the 'homepage' of the blog. If you have this homepage don't forget to also Allow it.
-
Well, no point in a blog that hurts your seo
I respectfully disagree with Martijin; I believe what you would want to do is disallow the Blog directory itself, not the whole site. It would seem if you Disallow: / and _Allow:/Blog/Post _ that you are telling SEs not to index anything on your site except for /Blog/Post.
I'd recommend:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/PostThis should block off the entire Blog directory except for your post subdirectory. As Maritijin stated; always test before you make real changes to your robots.txt.
-
That would be something like this, please check this or test this within Google Webmaster Tools if it works because I don't want to screw up your whole site. What this does is disallowing your complete site and just allows the /Blog/Post urls.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /Blog/Post
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
-
Please... Help me convince my boss that Keyword Density is not-important / damaging.
If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it. Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins2 -
Help with force redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, I'm unsure of where I should be putting the following code for one of my Wordpress websites so that they redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] This is my current htaccess file: *missing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Easigrass0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Inbound Affiliate Links: can this solution help?
Hello everyone, I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?). All our affiliates link to us as follows: http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname] Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below: http://mywebsite.com/page/ Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages. So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question. Thanks in advance to anyone. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file - will that have an impact on the way our site is crawled?
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file. All of their sitemap links are on a different domain and I'm wondering if this will have any impact on our searchability or potential rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tsmith1310 -
Robots.txt Syntax
I have been having a hard time finding any decent information regarding the robots.txt syntax that has been written in the last few years and I just want to verify some things as a review for myself. I have many occasions where I need to block particular directories in the URL, parameters and parameter values. I just wanted to make sure that I am doing this in the most efficient ways possible and thought you guys could help. So let's say I want to block a particular directory called "this" and this would be an example URL: www.domain.com/folder1/folder2/this/file.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
or
www.domain.com/folder1/this/folder2/file.html In order for me to block any URL that contains this folder anywhere in the URL I would use: User-agent: *
Disallow: /this/ Now lets say I have a parameter "that" I want to block and sometimes it is the first parameter and sometimes it isn't when it shows up in the URL. Would it look like this? User-agent: *
Disallow: ?that=
Disallow: &that= What about if there is only one value I want to block for "that" and the value is "NotThisGuy": User-agent: *
Disallow: ?that=NotThisGuy
Disallow: &that=NotThisGuy My big questions here are what are the most efficient ways to block a particular parameter and block a particular parameter value. Is there a more efficient way to deal with ? and & for when the parameter and value are either first or later? Secondly is there a list somewhere that will tell me all of the syntax and meaning that can be used for a robots.txt file? Thanks!0 -
Title Tag Help
Hi everyone, So, I have some general question's about Title tags. My question's are as follows: 1. If i have a title tag like this 'Commercial bathroom instillation '. Will I show up for Commercial bathroom or Commercial bathroom instillation? The reason I ask is, i'm aiming for Commercial bathroom which has more search volume, but here is where the problem comes in. If I have Commercial bathroom instillation it is a more compelling title. Ideally i'm aiming for Commercial Bathroom, so im in a bit of a conundrum, as you can see. 2. My second question is if I have 'Bath Review and Shower review' for my title tag. Will I show up for Bath Review individually, and shower review individually, or only when someone search's that exact query? I hope that makes sense thanks. Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Do comment links on blogs help the blog itself rank?
Hi I have a blog - Carzilla.co.uk - and it keeps getting what are pretty obviously spam comments with links to unconnected websites of various quality. The blog is quite new and not ranking highly in SERPs for anything in particular yet. So my question is, is it better to let some of these comments through so google can see activity on the site? Or do spammy comments with links make the site look like a link farm? Any advice on what my policy should be - purely from a Google serps perspective - would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0