How to Hide Directories in Search?
-
I noticed bad 404 error links in Google Webmaster Tools and they were pointing to directories that do not have an actual page, but hold information.
Ex: there are links pointing to our PDF folder which holds all of our pdf documents. If i type in , example.com/pdf/ it brings up a unformated webpage that displays all of our PDF links.
How do I prevent this from happening. Right now I am blocking these in my robots.txt file, but if i type them in, they still appear.
Or should I not worry about this?
-
Yes, a visit to example.com/dir should now return a 404 error (if you haven't done any redirecting/canonicalizing). This will increase your 404 count in Web Master tools but it's far preferable to the alternative. If you're not redirecting the robots.txt will eventually work and hopefully the links will just fall out of WMT.
-
My hosting company turned off directory browsing and now everything is how it should be. So to my understanding, if the server sees a file that does not have a index file, it should not be view able and should be forbidden. This shoujld not affect us from an SEO standpoint should it? My hosting company said they disabled all directories in our site, however everything still works, except for the forbidden file directories.
-
Basically it shouldn't really have an affect; those unformatted file listings are literally the web server automatically saying 'here's the files that are in this folder', there's no meta tags, description, on page elements, etc.
If you have these pages and they're ranking well, you generally don't want them to be. The automatic file browsing pages don't have your name, your company, etc. in them, and they're generally pretty ugly. They also theoretically could be 'stealing' juice from your 'real' pages, if your internal structure isn't flowing relevance properly.
Basically what I'm saying is that if these pages are having some kind of SEO effect, you probably don't want them to be since they're so basic.
Also I can't overstate the security concerns that directory browsing might be introducing. If someone can directory browse to where your code lives (.php, .aspx.vb, whatever) they may be able to read it. Code sometimes has important things like logins, passwords, merchant account ids, etc. in it that you definitely don't want people reading.
-
Agreed with Valerie that step 1 is to turn off those directory listing pages - that can be a security issue and you don't necessarily want people to see/access the whole list. Also, make doubly sure you don't have any internal links to that directory (Google crawled it somehow).
Generally, Robots.txt should prevent crawling, but it's not foolproof, and it's pretty bad about removing pages once they're indexed. If you can block the page from browsing and return a 404 for the root page, that should be fine. The other option would be to have the page removed in Google Webmaster Tools. You could request removal for the entire folder, but I'm guessing that you may want the actual PDFs indexed.
-
Will turning of directory browsing affect Search for all directories?
-
I really don't want to 301 redirect them as they are just holding files. This is happening with my includes file too. that holds our header, footer, navigation etc. I can check with our hosting company to find out.
-
I'd create an index.html for the directory, and then redirect it somewhere. This way, you're capturing the inbound links and then rescuing some of the inbound juice.
Otherwise, you can also check out this post for more info on other solutions and modifying your htaccess file to prevent the directory view - http://perishablepress.com/better-default-directory-views-with-htaccess/
-
Blocking it in robots.txt will work to hide it from search engines.
If you want to hide it from users or people to who type in the url, you can simply drop a blank "index.html" in the /pdf folder.
-
I would suggest 301'ing them to their /index.htm or /pdf.htm equivalents. If you don't know, a 301 is a signal to a web browser (or search crawler) saying "this page has permanently moved, please go to (otherpage.htm) instead".
Here's a good SEOMoz article explaining it a bit more:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
What might be more of a concern, is it sounds like your web server has directory browsing enabled. This could be a security issue (depending on your web server setup). Generally you don't want to expose directories if you don't have to because it gives a potential attacker insight into your system setup. Here's an example how to do it in Apache:
www.camelrichard.org/topics/Apache/Turn_OffDirectoryBrowsing
And IIS:
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731109(v=ws.10).aspx
If you like I can confirm if you have open directories if you give me the link, either here or through private message.
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
-
Layered navigation and hiding nav from user agent
I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc). This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Should I switch all paid-for directory backlinks to nofollow backlinks?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
ECommerce search results to noindex?
Hi, To avoid duplicated content and the possibility of thousands additional pages to an ecommerce website would it be a reasonable solution to have the page as a no-index, would this benefit the site? Thanks **Lantec **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lantec0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Empty search results labeled as Soft 404s?
I have a site with faceted search but sometimes when someone drills down too far it ends up with no results. The page and outlined and faceted navigation are still there. The site uses dynamic URLs for the faceted navigation but Google is reporting these no results pages as Soft 404s. How should we handle these? Should we redirect these? Can we return 404 in the status code but still show the no results page they are looking for? Thanks for your responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Is linking to search results bad for SEO?
If we have pages on our site that link to search results is that a bad thing? Should we set the links to "nofollow"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Block all search results (dynamic) in robots.txt?
I know that google does not want to index "search result" pages for a lot of reasons (dup content, dynamic urls, blah blah). I recently optimized the entire IA of my sites to have search friendly urls, whcih includes search result pages. So, my search result pages changed from: /search?12345&productblue=true&id789 to /product/search/blue_widgets/womens/large As a result, google started indexing these pages thinking they were static (no opposition from me :)), but i started getting WMT messages saying they are finding a "high number of urls being indexed" on these sites. Should I just block them altogether, or let it work itself out?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhutchings0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610