Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
-
Hi Mozzers!
We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter.
We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming.
But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems.
What could be the reason?
Best regards,
Martin
-
Sorry for the late reply. Feel free to send me a PM. (not sure I can help, but more than happy to take a look)
-
We do not currently have any sanitation rules in order to maintain the nocrawl param. But that is a good point. 301:ing will be difficult for us but I will definitely add the nocrawl param to the rel canonical of those internal SERPs.
-
Thank you, Igol. I will definitely look into your first suggestion.
-
Thank you, Cyrus.
This is what it looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /nocrawl=1The weird thing is that when testing one of the sample URLs (given by Google as "problematic" in the GWMT message and that contains the nocrawl param) on the GWMT "Blocked URLs" page by entering the contents of our robots.txt and the sample URL, Google says crawling of the URL is disallowed for Googlebot.
On the top of the same page, it says "Never" under the heading "Fetched when" (translated from Swedish..). But when i "Fetch as Google" our robots.txt, Googlebot has no problems fetching it. So i guess the "Never" information is due to a GWMT bug?
I also tested our robots.txt against your recommended service http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check. It says all robots has access to the sample URL above, but I gather the tool is not wildcard-savvy.
I will not disclose our domain in this context, please tell me if it is ok to send you a PW.
About the noindex stuff. Basically, the nocrawl param is added to internal links pointing to internal search result pages filtered by more than two params. Although we allow crawling of less complicated internal serps, we disallow indexing of most of them by "meta noindex".
-
Thanks.
100% agree with the Meta Noindex suggestion.
-
It can be tricky blocking parameters with robots.txt. The first thing you want to do is make sure your are actually blocking the URLs. There are a few good robots.txt checkers out there that can help:
You're file is probably going to look something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?nocrawl=1... but this could vary depending on exactly you don't want crawled
+1 to Igal's suggestion of handling these via parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
Finally, if your goal is to keep search results out of the index (it probably should be) then you should also highly consider using a meta robots NOINDEX tag on all search results pages. You can also slap a nofollow on links pointing to search results as this might also help Google steer clear of those pages.
Best of luck!
Edit: Here's what John Wu of Google Webmaster has to say...
"We show this warning when we find a high number of URLs on a site -- even before we attempt to crawl them. If you are blocking them with a robots.txt file, that's generally fine. If you really do have a high number of URLs on your site, you can generally ignore this message. If your site is otherwise small and we find a high number of URLs, then this kind of message can help you to fix any issues (or disallow access) before we start to access your server to check gazillions of URLs :-)."
-
Didn't say it wasn't.
I`m just not sure how these rules apply to parameters, since they are not a part of the "core" URL.
(For example: What happens if I take a URL from your site, change a nocrawl=1 to nocrawl=0 and link to it from mine?
Do you have any URL sanitation rules in place to overcome that or will the page be indexed by Googlebot when it crawls my site and moves on to yours?)Personally, when dealing with parameters, I find it easier to work with WMT so I was offering an easier workaround, (at least for me)
To tell you the truth, I would use hard-coded on page meta noindex/nofollow here (again, as parameters can be so easily manipulated).
-
Igal, thank your for replying.
But robots.txt disallowing URLs by matching patterns has been supported by Googlebot for a long time now.
-
Hi
I`m not sure if this is the best way to go about it.
Robots.txt is commonly used for folder level disallow rules, I`m not sure how it will respond to parameters.
Having said that, there are several things you can do here:
1. You can use WMT to zero in on this parameter and prevent it from being searched.
To do so choose Configuration>>URL Parameters, answer "Yes" to the question about content change and
check-in the 3rd bullet (Only URL with value...) Of course you'll need to choose "1" as the right value.2. If this still didn't solve your issue, you might want to try using htacess + regex to prevent access by user agent.
You can find user-agent information here Googlebot user agent listAlso, you may want to check my blog post about some of the less known Googlebot Facts (shameless self-promotion)
Best
Igal
-
I'll send you a PW, Des.
-
What the domain.?
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
-
Little confused regarding robots.txt
Hi there Mozzers! As a newbie, I have a question that what could happen if I write my robots.txt file like this... User-agent: * Allow: / Disallow: /abc-1/ Disallow: /bcd/ Disallow: /agd1/ User-agent: * Disallow: / Hope to hear from you...
Technical SEO | | DenorL0 -
Clarification regarding robots.txt protocol
Hi,
Technical SEO | | nlogix
I have a website , and having 1000 above url and all the url already got indexed in Google . Now am going to stop all the available services in my website and removed all the landing pages from website. Now only home page available . So i need to remove all the indexed urls from Google . I have already used robots txt protocol for removing url. i guess it is not a good method for adding bulk amount of urls (nearly 1000) in robots.txt . So just wanted to know is there any other method for removing indexed urls.
Please advice.0 -
How to use robots.txt to block areas on page?
Hi, Across the categories/product pages on out site there are archives/shipping info section and the texts are always the same. Would this be treated as duplicated content and harmful for seo? How can I alter robots.txt to tell google not to crawl those particular text Thanks for any advice!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Can I disallow my subdomain for penguin recover?
Hi, I have a site like BannerBuzz.com, before last penguin my site's all keywords were in good position in google, but after penguin hit on my website, my all keywords are going down and down day by day, i have done some changes in my website for improvement, but in 1 change i have some confusion. i have one sub domain (http://reviews.bannerbuzz.com/), which display my websites all keywords user reviews, in which every category's 15 reviews are display in my website http://www.bannerbuzz.com so are those user reviews consider as duplicate content between sub domain and main website. can i disallow sub domain from all search engine? currently sub domain is open for all search engine, is that helpful to block it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Custom Permalinks (aka alias') - does it look spammy to googlebot?
I am moving my whole site over to wordpress (150+pgs). In the process I assigned pages to appropriate parent pages via "page attributes". I was really excited about this. I like how it organizes everything in the pages dashboard. I also think that the sitemap that comes with my theme can create something really great for visitors with this info. What I realized after doing that is that it changed my url to include the parent page. Basically, the url is now "domain.com/parent-page/child-page.html". This is rather disasterous because the url's of these newly created child pages on my old site are simple "domain.com/child-page". Not that they're defined as parent or child pages on my existing dreamweaver/html site... but you know what I mean - Right?! I got a plugin called "Permalink Editor" to let me customize the url. So, I went through all of the child pages and got rid of the parent page in the url. Then when I woke up this morning I realized that what I've created is a "permalink alias". That sounds a little bit scary to me. Perhaps like google could consider it spam and like I'm trying to "sculpt link flow". I'm not... I'm just trying to recreate my site as it is in wordpress. I want the site to be exactly the same in terms of the url's. But, I want the many benefit's of wordpress' CMS. Should I go an unassign all of the parent/child pages in the "Page Attributes". Or, am I being paranoid and should I leave it as is? fyi - this is the first page that came up with I searched for permalink alias. It looks kind of black-hatty to me?!
Technical SEO | | nsjadmin
- http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/wordpress-seo/seo-ultimate-4-7/ Thanks so much. I look forward to a response!0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
How to allow googlebot past paywall
Does anyone know of any ways or ideas to allow Google/Bing etc. to index your content, but have it behind a paywall for users?
Technical SEO | | MirandaP0 -
Mobile site - allow robot traffic
Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site. That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage. Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site. Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches. To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing. Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)
Technical SEO | | NicB10