Should I robots block this directory?
-
There's about 43k pages indexed in this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines.
Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory?
ie.
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/
http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/
-
Totally agree with Ryan Kent. You should write a paragraph of content that is unique to the company featured. The chart is not unique enough and you will get flagged as having a high ratio of duplicate content. You should also look at all the other SEO elements on this page, understand what keyphrases you are targeting and modify the title, meta and H1 tags.
-
Should I robots block this directory?
I wouldn't.
Robots.txt in general should only be used when there is no other alternate means available to block content. An example is when your site is created by a CMS or e-commerce platform which does not offer the flexibility to noindex individual pages.
By blocking your site's content, you are preventing search engines not only from indexing the pages, but from following any links on those pages. You are restricting the way a crawler can travel on your site, which is generally a bad idea.
Additionally, I would suggest those pages offer value. "Petco salary comparison", "Target wages" and other search queries could generate results for those pages. Those pages contain helpful information which is otherwise not easily found on the internet. If that was my site, I would work to improve the optimization of those pages, not block them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.txt question
I notice something weird in Google robots. txt tester I have this line Disallow: display= in my robots.text but whatever URL I give to test it says blocked and shows this line in robots.text for example this line is to block pages like http://www.abc.com/lamps/floorlamps?display=table but if I test http://www.abc.com/lamps/floorlamps or any page it shows as blocked due to Disallow: display= am I doing something wrong or Google is just acting strange? I don't think pages with no display= are blocked in real.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rbai0 -
Should I disallow all URL query strings/parameters in Robots.txt?
Webmaster Tools correctly identifies the query strings/parameters used in my URLs, but still reports duplicate title tags and meta descriptions for the original URL and the versions with parameters. For example, Webmaster Tools would report duplicates for the following URLs, despite it correctly identifying the "cat_id" and "kw" parameters: /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse
/Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?cat_id=87
/Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?kw=CROM Additionally, theses pages have self-referential canonical tags, so I would think I'd be covered, but I recently read that another Mozzer saw a great improvement after disallowing all query/parameter URLs, despite Webmaster Tools not reporting any errors. As I see it, I have two options: Manually tell Google that these parameters have no effect on page content via the URL Parameters section in Webmaster Tools (in case Google is unable to automatically detect this, and I am being penalized as a result). Add "Disallow: *?" to hide all query/parameter URLs from Google. My concern here is that most backlinks include the parameters, and in some cases these parameter URLs outrank the original. Any thoughts?0 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
Block web archieve/way back machine
Hi i want to block web archive/wayback machine from indexing my site and creating a record of it on their database. Any ideas on how to do this? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey008
Superpak2 -
Using Meta Header vs Robots.txt
Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
MOZ crawl report says category pages blocked by meta robots but theyr'e not?
I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow. This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them. When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow? Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl? As yet these pages aren't indexed by google. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Sam.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Zip Code Blocks the Search Engines!
I have a site where when you visit the product pages, it asks for your zip code. This is obviously blocking the bots from crawling the site. I know you can basically tell the bots how to ignore the zip code feature but I am not exactly sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhawk0 -
Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt
Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links. While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google. For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do? Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed. Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY1