Question about Robot.txt
-
I just started my own e-commerce website and I hosted it to one of the popular e-commerce platform Pinnacle Cart. It has a lot of functions like, page sorting, mobile website, etc. After adjusting the URL parameters in Google webmaster last 3 weeks ago, I still get the same duplicate errors on meta titles and descriptions based from Google Crawl and SEOMOZ crawl. I am not sure if I made a mistake of choosing pinnacle cart because it is not that flexible in terms of editing the core website pages. There is now way to adjust the canonical, to insert robot.txt on every pages etc. however it has a function to submit just one page of robot.txt. and edit the .htcaccess. The website pages is in PHP format.
For example this URL:
www.mycompany.com has a duplicate title and description with www.mycompany.com/site-map.html (there is no way of editing the title and description of my sitemap)
Another error is
www.mycompany.com has a duplicate title and description with http://www.mycompany.com/brands?url=brands
Is it possible to exclude those website with "url=" and my "sitemap.html" in the robot.txt? or the URL parameters from Google is enough and it just takes a lot of time.
Can somebody help me on the format of Robot.txt. Please? thanks
-
Thank you for your reply. This surely helps. I will probably edit the htaccess.
-
That's the problem with most sitebuilder type prgrams, they are very limited.
Perhaps look at your site title, and page titles. Usually the site title will be the included on all of your webpages followed by the page title so you could simply name your site www.yourcompany.com then add an individual page title to each page.
A robots.txt file is not supposed to be added to every page and only tells the bots what to crawl, and what not to.
If you can edit the htaccess, you should be able to get to the individual pages and insert/change the code for titles, just be aware that doing it manually can work, but sometimes when you go back to make an edit in the builder it may undo all of your manual changes, if that's the case, get your site perfect, then do the individual code changes as the last change.
Hope this helps.
-
I have no way of adding those too. Ooops thanks for the warning. I guess I would have to wait for Google to filter out the parameters.
Thanks for your answer.
-
You certainly don't want to block your sitemap file in robots.txt. It takes some time for Google to filter out the parameters and that is the right approach. If there is no way to change the title, I wouldn't be so concerned over a few pages with duplicate titles. Do you have the ability to add a noindex,follow meta tag on these pages?
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
-
Rel=canonical on landing page question
Currently we have two versions of a category page on our site (listed below) Version A: www.example.com/category • lives only in the SERPS but does not live on our site navigation • has links • user experience is not the best Version B: www.example.com/category?view=all • lives in our site navigation • has a rel=canonical to version A • very few links and doesn’t appear in the SERPS • user experience is better than version A Because the user experience of version B is better than version A I want to take out the rel=canonical in version B to version A and instead put a rel=canonical to version B in version A. If I do this will version B show up in the SERPS eventually and replace version A? If so, how long do you think this would take? Will this essentially pass page rank from version A to version B
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Do robot.txts permanently affect websites even after they have been removed?
A client has a Wordpress blog to sit alongside their company website. They kept it hidden whilst they were developing what it looked like, keeping it un-searchable by Search Engines. It was still live, but Wordpress put a robots.txt in place. When they were ready they removed the robots.txt by clicking the "allow Search Engines to crawl this site" button. It took a month and a half for their blog to show in Search Engines once the robot.txt was removed. Google is now recognising the site (as a "site:" test has shown) however, it doesn't rank well for anything. This is despite the fact they are targeting keywords with very little organic competition. My question is - could the fact that they developed the site behind a robot.txt (rather than offline) mean the site is permanently affected by the robot.txt in the eyes of the Search Engines, even after that robot.txt has been removed? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on the situation.
Technical SEO | | Driver720 -
Robots.txt vs. meta noindex, follow
Hi guys, I wander what your opinion is concerning exclution via the robots.txt file.
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
Do you advise to keep using this? For example: User-agent: *
Disallow: /sale/*
Disallow: /cart/*
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /wishlist/* Or do you prefer using the meta tag 'noindex, follow' instead?
I keep hearing different suggestions.
I'm just curious what your opinion / suggestion is. Regards,
Tom Vledder0 -
Question about keywords on multiple pages
Hello all great to be apart of this community, My question is: I am trying to rank for two separate "two keyword" searches which are "BBB boost" and "ZZZ boost" I am planning to put "ZZZ boost" on my homepage/landing, and "BBB boost" on my second page where the end user actually purchases said product. "ZZZ boost" - receives around 22,000 monthly searches and "BBB boost" - around 5000 monthly searches Because each of these share the one keyword "boost" in them, will it affect my ability to rank for even one page on the "two keyword" phrase? Or will it cause both pages to come up in the google search results on either "two keyword" phrase because they share the same word "boost" in them? If so does that affect the ability to rank 1 page since they share the same domain name, will it divide page ranking/serp ranking?
Technical SEO | | zerk890 -
Blocked by robots
my client GWT has a number of notices for "blocked by meta-robots" - these are all either blog posts/categories/or tags his former seo told him this: "We've activated following settings: Use noindex for Categories Use noindex for Archives Use noindex for Tag Archives to reduce keyword stuffing & duplicate post tags
Technical SEO | | Ezpro9
Disabling all 3 noindex settings above may remove google blocks but also will send too many similar tags, post archives/category. " is this guy correct? what would be the problem with indexing these? am i correct in thinking they should be indexed? thanks0 -
Robots txt
We have a development site that we want google and other bots to stay out of but we want roger to have access. Currently our robots.txt looks like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | LadyApollo
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /development/ What would i need to addd or change to let him through? Thank you.0 -
Invisible robots.txt?
So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp0 -
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!
Technical SEO | | STPseo0