Spider Indexed Disallowed URLs
-
Hi there,
In order to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content and titles for a cliënt, we have disallowed all spiders for some areas of the site in August via the robots.txt-file. This was followed by a huge decrease in errors in our SEOmoz crawl report, which, of course, made us satisfied.
In the meanwhile, we haven't changed anything in the back-end, robots.txt-file, FTP, website or anything. But our crawl report came in this November and all of a sudden all the errors where back. We've checked the errors and noticed URLs that are definitly disallowed. The disallowment of these URLs is also verified by our Google Webmaster Tools, other robots.txt-checkers and when we search for a disallowed URL in Google, it says that it's blocked for spiders. Where did these errors came from? Was it the SEOmoz spider that broke our disallowment or something? You can see the drop and the increase in errors in the attached image.
Thanks in advance.
[
](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> [
](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> LAAFj.jpg
-
This was what I was looking for! The pages are indexed by Google, yes, but they aren't being crawled by the Googlebot (as my Webmaster Tool and the Matt Cutts Video is telling me), but they are occasionally being crawled by the Rogerbot probably (not monthly). Thank you very much!
-
Yes yes, canonicalization or meta noindex-tag would be better of course to pass the possible link juice, but we aren't worried about that. I was worried Google would still see the pages as duplicates. (couldn't really distile that out of the article, although it was useful!) Barry Smith answered that last issue in the answer below, but i do want to thank you for your insight.
-
The directives issued in a robots.txt file are just a suggestion to bots. One that Google does follow though.
Malicious bots will ignore them and occasionally even bots that follow the directives may mess up (probably what's happened here).
Google may also index pages that you've blocked as they've found them via a link as explained here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0 - or for an overview of what Google does with robots.txt files you can read here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449
I'd suggest you look at other ways of fixing the problem than just blocking 1500 pages but I see you've considered what would be required to fix the issues without removing the pages from a crawl and decided the value isn't there.
If WMT is telling you the pages are blocked from being crawled I'd believe that.
Try searching for a url that should be blocked in Google and see if it's indexed or do site:http://yoursitehere.com and see if blocked pages come up.
-
The assumptions of what to expect from using robots.txt may not be in line with the realities. Crawling a page isn't the same thing as indexing the content to appear in SERPs and even with robots, your pages can be crawled.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions
-
Thanks mister Goyal. Of course we have been thinking about ways and figured out some options in doing so, but implementing these solutions would be disastreous from a time/financial perspective. The pages that we have blocked from the spiders aren't needed for visibility in the search engines and don't carry much link juice, they are only there for the visitors, so we decided we don't really need them for our SEO-efforts in a positive way. But when these pages do get crawled and the engines notice the huge amount of duplicates, i recogn this would have a negative influence on our site as a whole.
So, the problem we have is focused on the doubts we have on the legitimacy of the report. If SEOMoz can crawl it, the Googlebot could probably too, right, since we've used: User-agent: *
-
Mark
Are you blocking all your bots to spider these erroneous URLs ? Is there a way for you to fix these such that either they don't exist or they are not duplicate anymore.
I'd just recommend looking from that perspective as well. Not just the intent of making those errors disappear from the SEOMoz report.
I hope this helps.
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
-
Indexation and visibility problem
Hi I am working on a website (usarrestsearch org) for 6 months. I wrote about 100 pages full of good content. for some reason I see only 75% of the pages indexed in GWT. and Im having problems with SERP positions not rising. I suspect that it might be connected to the structure of the site. will appreciate any help thanks
Technical SEO | | holdportals0 -
URL Format
Often we have web platforms that have a default URL structure that looks something like this www.widgetcompany.co.uk/widget-gallery/coloured-widgets/red-widgets This format is quite well structured but would it just be more effective to be www.widgetcompany.co.uk/red-widgets? I realise that it may depend on a lot of factors but generally is it better to have the shorter URL if targeting the key phrase "red widgets" One thing, it certainly looks a bit keyword stuffy with all those "widgets"
Technical SEO | | vital_hike0 -
What is the best practice to re-index the de-indexed pages due to a bad migration
Dear Mozers, We have a Drupal site with more than 200K indexed URLs. Before 6 months a bad website migration happened without proper SEO guidelines. All the high authority URLs got rewritten by the client. Most of them are kept 404 and 302, for last 6 months. Due to this site traffic dropped more than 80%. I found today that around 40K old URLs with good PR and authority are de-indexed from Google (Most of them are 404 and 302). I need to pass all the value from old URLs to new URLs. Example URL Structure
Technical SEO | | riyas_
Before Migration (Old)
http://www.domain.com/2536987
(Page Authority: 65, HTTP Status:404, De-indexed from Google) After Migration (Current)
http://www.domain.com/new-indexed-and-live-url-version Does creating mass 301 redirects helps here without re-indexing the old URLS? Please share your thoughts. Riyas0 -
Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
Hello, 7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed. Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters? I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | yacpro130 -
Odd Google Indexing Issue
I have encountered something odd with Google indexing. According to the Google cache my site was last updated on April 6. I had been making a series of changes on April 7th and none of them show up in the cached version of the site (naturally). Then, on the 8th, my rankings seem to have dropped about 6 places and the main SERP is showing a text that isn't even on the Web site. The cached version has the correct page title from the page that was indexed on the 6th. How do I learn where Google is picking this up from? There is a clean page title tag on my Web site. I've checked the server, etc to see what's going on. The text isn't completely unrelated, but it definitely impacted my ranking. Does Google ever have these hiccups when indexing?
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Correct Indexing problem
I recently redirected an old site to a new site. All the URLs were the same except the domain. When I redirected them I failed to realize the new site had https enable on all pages. I have noticed that Google is now indexing both the http and https version of pages in the results. How can I fix this? I am going to submit a sitemap but don't know if there is more I can do to get this fixed faster.
Technical SEO | | kicksetc0 -
URL Rewrite
We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site? What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Handling '?' in URLs.
Adios! (or something), I've noticed in my SEOMoz campaign that I am getting duplicate content warnings for URLs with extensions. For example: /login.php?action=lostpassword /login.php?action=register etc. What is the best way to deal with these type of URLs to avoid duplicate content penelties in search engines? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0