Robots.txt assistance
-
I want to block all the inner archive news pages of my website in robots.txt - we don't have R&D capacity to set up rel=next/prev or create a central page that all inner pages would have a canonical back to, so this is the solution.
The first page I want indexed reads:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=1all subsequent pages that I want blocked because they don't contain any new content read:
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=2
http://www.xxxx.news/?p=3
etc....There are currently 245 inner archived pages and I would like to set it up so that future pages will automatically be blocked since we are always writing new news pieces. Any advice about what code I should use for this?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for all the input and advice!
We are a gaming site that publishes industry news 2-3 times a week, but that is not our main source of income
-
"I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction"
Absolutely.
-
Thanks Andy. I did see that and that is why I mentioned at the end that being a content site and if that generates revenue that they should consider investing some money in that direction.
If they are short on money/resources/capacity and the robots.txt solution could actually negatively impact indexation of content that is producing/justifying the current level of money/resources/capacity they could end up in worse position than where they started, i.e. having less money/resources/capacity.
-
If you read the original post again, Sara says "we don't have R&D capacity".
They wouldn't be able to do all this.
-Andy
-
I think you are missing something here if you want to get these pages out of the index. Plus, your use of Robots may harm how Google finds and ranks your actual news items.
First, you have to add the noindex meta tag to pages 2-N in your pagination. Let Google crawl them and take them out of the index.
If you just add them to robots.txt, Google will not crawl, but will also not remove them from the index.
Once you get them out of the index, keeping those tags in place will prevent reindexation and you don't have to add them to Robots.txt.
More importantly, you want pages 2-N being spidered but not indexed. You want Google to crawl your paginated pages to find all of your deep content. Otherwise, unless you have a XML or HTML sitemap, or some other crawlable navigational aid, you are actually preventing Google from crawling and then ranking your content.
Read this Moz post
http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
There is a section titled "Why Meta Robots is Better than Robots.txt" that will confirm my points.
Lastly. Step back a second. If you are a news/content site and this helps you to generate revenue, and you have a bunch of news pages, and this is important content, spend some money on Development to implement the rel=next/prev. It is worth it to get Google crawling your stuff properly.
Good luck!
-
Definitely something to test. I'm not sure of the rules that Google will apply with this and which way round works.
-Andy
-
I think it has to be the other way around: Disallow: /?p=* Allow: /?p=1 as you want to first disallow everything with the P parameter but then allow the first page. You should test it but I think in Andy's example you will still block the first page which you've just allowed.
-
I haven't actually done this myself, but I suspect that pattern matching is your solution here.
However, what you want to be able to do is disallow the whole pattern and then allow just the first page:
Allow: /?p=1 Disallow: /?p=*
The thing I don't have the answer to, is if this will work by first allowing the page 1, and then blocking all others. I don't have a method for this in blocking via robots as this is normally handed with other solutions you mention.
You can try it though through Webmaster tools:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- Under Crawl, click Blocked URLs.
- If it's not already selected, click the** Test robots.txt** tab.
- Copy the content of your robots.txt file, and paste it into the first box.
- In the URLs box, list the site to test against.
- In the User-agents list, select the user-agents you want.
-Andy
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
-
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
Robots.txt Disallowed Pages and Still Indexed
Alright, I am pretty sure I know the answer is "Nothing more I can do here." but I just wanted to double check. It relates to the robots.txt file and that pesky "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt". Typically people want the URL indexed and the normal Meta Description to be displayed but I don't want the link there at all. I purposefully am trying to robots that stuff outta there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
My question is, has anybody tried to get a page taken out of the Index and had this happen; URL still there but pesky robots.txt message for meta description? Were you able to get the URL to no longer show up or did you just live with this? Thanks folks, you are always great!0 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?
Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap. We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap? In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file? Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it. I appreciate your help with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo.owl0 -
Robot.txt File Not Appearing, but seems to be working?
Hi Mozzers, I am conducting a site audit for a client, and I am confused with what they are doing with their robot.txt file. It shows in GWT that there is a file and it is blocking about 12K URLs (image attached). It also shows in GWT that the file was downloaded 10 hours ago successfully. However, when I go to the robot.txt file link, the page is blank. Would they be doing something advanced to be blocking URLs to hide it it from users? It appears to correctly be blocking log-ins, but I would like to know for sure that it is working correctly. Any advice on this would be most appreciated. Thanks! Jared ihgNxN7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J-Banz0 -
Blocking poor quality content areas with robots.txt
I found an interesting discussion on seoroundtable where Barry Schwartz and others were discussing using robots.txt to block low quality content areas affected by Panda. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-farmer-advice-13090.html The article is a bit dated. I was wondering what current opinions are on this. We have some dynamically generated content pages which we tried to improve after panda. Resources have been limited and alas, they are still there. Until we can officially remove them I thought it may be a good idea to just block the entire directory. I would also remove them from my sitemaps and resubmit. There are links coming in but I could redirect the important ones (was going to do that anyway). Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_edvisors0 -
Will disallowing in robots.txt noindex a page?
Google has indexed a page I wish to remove. I would like to meta noindex but the CMS isn't allowing me too right now. A suggestion o disallow in robots.txt would simply stop them crawling I expect or is it also an instruction to noindex? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Can I use a "no index, follow" command in a robot.txt file for a certain parameter on a domain?
I have a site that produces thousands of pages via file uploads. These pages are then linked to by users for others to download what they have uploaded. Naturally, the client has blocked the parameter which precedes these pages in an attempt to keep them from being indexed. What they did not consider, was they these pages are attracting hundreds of thousands of links that are not passing any authority to the main domain because they're being blocked in robots.txt Can I allow google to follow, but NOT index these pages via a robots.txt file --- or would this have to be done on a page by page basis?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PapaRelevance0