Robots Disallow Backslash - Is it right command
-
Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character
ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product
www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product
Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk
Need to know for command :-
User-agent: * Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,
-
Thanks, you seem lucky to me.. Almost after 2 month i have got the code for making all these encoded url's redirect correctly. Finally, now if one types
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
then he's redirected through 301 to the correct url
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
-
Hello Gagan,
I think the best way to handle this would be using the rel canonical tag or rewriting the URLs to get rid of the parameters and replace them with something more user-friendly.
The rel canonical tag would be the easiest way out of those two. I notice the version without the encoding (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 ) have a rel canonical tag that correctly references itself as the canonical version. However, the encoded URLs (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10) which is actually http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 does NOT have a rel canonical tag.
If the version with the backslash had a rel canonical tag stating that the following URL is canonical it would solve your issue, I think.
Canonical URL:
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 -
Sure, If i show you some url they are crawled as :-
Sample Incorrect URLs crawled and reported as duplicate one in Google Webmaster & Moz too
|
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
| http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=category&Itemid=2 |
|
Correct URL
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2
What we found online
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. URLs cannot contain spaces.
%22 reflects - " and %5c as \ (forward slash)
We intend to remove these duplicate one created having %22 and %5c within them..
Many thanks
-
I am not entirely sure I understood your question as intended, but I will do my best to answer.
I would not put this in my robots.txt flie because it could possibly be misunderstood as a forward slash, in which case your entire domain would be blocked:
Disallow: \
We can possibly provide you with some alternative suggestions on how to keep Google from crawling those pages if you could share some real examples.
It may be best to rewrite/redirect those URls instead since they don't seem to be the canonical version you intend to be presented to the user.
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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Are We Doing Link Building Right? Do Certain Links Actually Matter?
I've been thinking about this as I go through my daily link building activities for clients. Do we really know as much as we hope/think we do about how Google values inbound links, which links actually matter, and how much these link signals play into rankings? For example, does Google REALLY value the fact that a business is paying to sponsor a local sports team, or to join a local chamber? For local businesses, link building is rather difficult because they don't necessarily have the resources or ability to implement ongoing Content Marketing initiatives to earn links naturally. How can we be sure that the things we recommend actually make a difference? I had my family real estate business featured in almost a dozen articles as expert sources, with links from authoritative sites like Realtor.com and others. Does Google distinguish between a profile link on a site like Realtor.com vs. being featured as an expert source on home page news? Just second guessing a lot of this today. Anyone can to share thoughts and insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Is robots met tag a more reliable than robots.txt at preventing indexing by Google?
What's your experience of using robots meta tag v robots.txt when it comes to a stand alone solution to prevent Google indexing? I am pretty sure robots meta tag is more reliable - going on own experiences, I have never experience any probs with robots meta tags but plenty with robots.txt as a stand alone solution. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Robots.txt and redirected backlinks
Hey there, since a client's global website has a very complex structure which lead to big duplicate content problems, we decided to disallow crawler access and instead allow access to only a few relevant subdirectories. While indexing has improved since this I was wondering if we might have cut off link juice. Since several backlinks point to the disallowed root directory and are from there redirected (301) to the allowed directory I was wondering if this could cause any problems? Example: If there is a backlink pointing to example.com (disallowed in robots.txt) and is redirected from there to example.com/uk/en (allowed in robots.txt). Would this cut off the link juice? Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
Can someone please tell me if my H1 Tag is in the right place on my View Source. It looks like its in the body and not in the head
Hi Mozzers, I've been looking at the View Source on my landing pages , and it looks to me that my H1 Tag etc is not in the head but in the body . My developer says its in the correct place , but can someone please confirm as it looks wrong to me. short url link - http://goo.gl/vfXeut Many thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How do I get my site to rank in the right country?
I work with an organization in the United States that purchased a 3 letter .com domain from another company based in the Netherlands. After transferring the domain and setting up the new site we've completed the following: Registered the site in Webmaster Tools and selected the United States as the international target target Used Schema Markup on the US business address Built links from US based websites Setup a Google My Business site and verified the address All site content is in english Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website Despite these actions, our website rarely shows up in Google.com search results. However, we're in the top 10 for many of the same queries when performing searches at Google.nl - Interestingly enough, if we set our location for the US and do a search in Google.nl we do not show up in the search results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianspatterson
It has been about 18 months since we've completed these actions and Google still assumes our website is best served and targeted towards people in the Netherlands. Is there anything else we can do to fix this?Thanks!0 -
Meta No INDEX and Robots - Optimizing Crawl Budget
Hi, Sometime ago, a few thousand pages got into Google's index - they were "product pop up" pages, exact duplicates of the actual product page but a "quick view". So I deleted them via GWT and also put in a Meta No Index on these pop up overlays to stop them being indexed and causing dupe content issues. They are no longer within the index as far as I can see, i do a site:www.mydomain.com/ajax and nothing appears - So can I block these off now with robots.txt to optimize my crawl budget? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100