Robot.txt pattern matching
-
Hola fellow SEO peoples!
Site: http://www.sierratradingpost.com
robot: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/robots.txt
Please see the following line: Disallow: /keycodebypid~*
We are trying to block URLs like this:
http://www.sierratradingpost.com/keycodebypid~8855/for-the-home~d~3/kitchen~d~24/
but we still find them in the Google index.
1. we are not sure if we need to specify the robot to use pattern matching.
2. we are not sure if the format is correct. Should we use Disallow: /keycodebypid*/ or /*keycodebypid/ or even /*keycodebypid~/?
What is even more confusing is that the meta robot command line says "noindex" - yet they still show up. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />
Thank you!
-
ok, so not sure sure this was shared. Matt Cutts talking on this same subject.
| | <cite class="kvm">www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2giR-WKUfY</cite> |
-
John, The article was a real eye-opener!Thanks again!
-
Somehow Google is finding these pages, but you're disallowing the Googlebot from reading the page, so it doesn't know anything about the meta noindex tag on the page. If you have meta noindex tags on all of these pages, you can remove that line in your robots.txt preventing bots from reading these pages, and as Google crawls these pages, they should remove them from their SERPs.
-
Great point! I will remember that. However I have both the disallow line in the robots.txt file and I also have the noindex meta command. Yet Google shows 3000 of them!?!?!?!
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.sierratradingpost.com+keycodebypid
-
Well done John!!!
-
Hi,
then you have the robots.txt and the meta tag. I think its better the metatag (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt)
Have you WebMaster Tools in your web? you can test your robots.txt file (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449)
-
Here's a good SEOMoz post about this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts. What's most likely happening is that the disallow in robots.txt is preventing the bots from indexing the page, so they're not going to find the meta noindex tag. If people link to one of these pages externally, the disallow in robots.txt does not prevent the page from appearing in search results.
The robots.txt syntax you're using now looks correct to me for what you're trying to do.
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
-
Using one robots.txt for two websites
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemap Is this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Adding your sitemap to robots.txt
Hi everyone, Best practice question: When adding your sitemap to your robots.txt file, do you add the whole sitemap at once or do you add different subcategories (products, posts, categories,..) separately? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
"Url blocked by robots.txt." on my Video Sitemap
I'm getting a warning about "Url blocked by robots.txt." on my video sitemap - but just for youtube videos? Has anyone else encountered this issue, and how did you fix it if so?! Thanks, J
Technical SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
Robots.txt crawling URL's we dont want it to
Hello We run a number of websites and underneath them we have testing websites (sub-domains), on those sites we have robots.txt disallowing everything. When I logged into MOZ this morning I could see the MOZ spider had crawled our test sites even though we have said not to. Does anyone have an ideas how we can stop this happening?
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Do i have my robots.txt file set up properly
Hi, just doing some seo on my site and i am not sure if i have my robots file set correctly. i use joomla and my website is www.in2town.co.uk. here is my robots file, does this look correct to you User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ many thanks1 -
Robots.txt file question? NEver seen this command before
Hey Everyone! Perhaps someone can help me. I came across this command in the robots.txt file of our Canadian corporate domain. I looked around online but can't seem to find a definitive answer (slightly relevant). the command line is as follows: Disallow: /*?* I'm guessing this might have something to do with blocking php string searches on the site?. It might also have something to do with blocking sub-domains, but the "?" mark puzzles me 😞 Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0