How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
-
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant -
http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice
How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt
Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed.
Any suggestions?
Cheers,
Mark
-
Hi Nakul, its Drupal
Mark
-
What CMS is it Mark ?
-
Thanks, is there a way to test it out before actually implementing it with the site.
The site is non-wordpress aswell.
Cheers,
Mark
-
I agree. I would suggest adding the noindex on the pages and letting the bots crawl them. Blocking them would prevent future crawl of these pages, but I am guessing you would also want to remove the existing pages.
Therefore add the noindex first, wait a few days and then add the disallow (Although technically if they are noindex, you don't really need the disallow).
-
Hi Mark
If your using Wordpress then I would recommend SEO Yoast to resolve the tag issue. If not then I suggest you amend the robots.txt file to resolve.
Here is an example:
Disallow: /?tag=
Disallow: /?subcats=
Disallow: /*?features_hash=NOTE:
Be very careful when blocking search engines. Test and test again!
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
-
Can a duplicate page referencing the original page on another domain in another country using the 'canonical link' still get indexed locally?
Hi I wonder if anyone could help me on a canonical link query/indexing issue. I have given an overview, intended solution and question below. Any advice on this query will be much appreciated. Overview: I have a client who has a .com domain that includes blog content intended for the US market using the correct lang tags. The client also has a .co.uk site without a blog but looking at creating one. As the target keywords and content are relevant across both UK and US markets and not to duplicate work the client has asked would it be worthwhile centralising the blog or provide any other efficient blog site structure recommendations. Suggested solution: As the domain authority (DA) on the .com/.co.uk sites are in the 60+ it would risky moving domains/subdomain at this stage and would be a waste not to utilise the DAs that have built up on both sites. I have suggested they keep both sites and share the same content between them using a content curated WP plugin and using the 'canonical link' to reference the original source (US or UK) - so not to get duplicate content issues. My question: Let's say I'm a potential customer in the UK and i'm searching using a keyword phrase that the content that answers my query is on both the UK and US site although the US content is the original source.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonRayner
Will the US or UK version blog appear in UK SERPs? My gut is the UK blog will as Google will try and serve me the most appropriate version of the content and as I'm in the UK it will be this version, even though I have identified the US source using the canonical link?2 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
301 redirect or Robots.txt on an interstatial page
Hey guys, I have an affiliate tracking system that works like this : an affiliate puts up a certain code on his site, for example : www.domain.com/track/aff_id This url leads to a page where the hit is counted, analysed and then 302 redirects to my sales page with the affiliates ID in the url : www.mysalespage.com/?=aff_id. However, we've noticed recently that one affiliate seems to be ranking for our own name and the url google indexed was his tracking url (domain.com/track/aff_id). Which is strange because there is absolutely nothing on that page, its just an interstatial page so that our stats tracking software can properly filter hits. To remove the affiliate's url from showing up in the serps, I've come up with 2 solutions : 1 - Change the redirect to a 301 redirect on his track page. 2 - Change our robots.txt page to block all domain.com/track/ pages from being indexed. My question is : if I 301 redirect instead of 302, will I keep the affiliates from outranking me for my own name AND pass on link juice or should I simply block google from crawling the interstatial tracking pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
Disallow my store in robots.txt?
Should I disallow my store directory in robots.txt? Here is the URL: https://www.stdtime.com/store/ Here are my reasons for suggesting this: SEOMOZ finds crawl "errors" in there that I don't care about I don't think I care if the search engines index those pages I only have one product, and it is not an impulse buy My product has a 60 day sales cycle, so price is less important than features
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raywhite0 -
Rel Alternate tag and canonical tag implementation question
Hello, I have a question about the correct way to implement the canoncial and alternate tags for a site supporting multiple languages and markets. Here's our setup. We have 3 sites, each serving a specific region, and each available in 3 languages. www.example.com : serves the US, default language is English www.example.ca : serves Canada, default language is English www.example.com.mx : serves Mexico, default language is Spanish In addition, each sites can be viewed in English, French or Spanish, by adding a language specific sub-directory prefix ( /fr , /en, /es). The implementation of the alternate tag is fairly straightforward. For the homepage, on www.example.com, it would be: -MX” href=“http://www.example.com.mx/index.html” /> -MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/fr/index.html“ />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amiee
-MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/en/index.html“ />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/fr/index.html” />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/es/index.html“ />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/fr/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/es/index.html” /> My question is about the implementation of the canonical tag. Currently, each domain has its own canonical tag, as follows: rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/index.html"> <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.ca="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
<link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com.mx="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> I am now wondering is I should set the canonical tag for all my domains to: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> This is what seems to be suggested on this example from the Google help center. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 What do you think?0 -
What content should I block in wodpress with robots.txt?
I need to know if anyone has tips on creating a good robots.txt. I have read a lot of info, but I am just not clear on what I should allow and not allow on wordpress. For example there are pages and posts, then attachments, wp-admin, wp-content and so on. Does anyone have a good robots.txt guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0