"Extremely high number of URLs" warning for robots.txt blocked pages
-
I have a section of my site that is exclusively for tracking redirects for paid ads. All URLs under this path do a 302 redirect through our ad tracking system:
http://www.mysite.com/trackingredirect/blue-widgets?ad_id=1234567 --302--> http://www.mysite.com/blue-widgets
This path of the site is blocked by our robots.txt, and none of the pages show up for a site: search.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /trackingredirect
However, I keep receiving messages in Google Webmaster Tools about an "extremely high number of URLs", and the URLs listed are in my redirect directory, which is ostensibly not indexed.
If not by robots.txt, how can I keep Googlebot from wasting crawl time on these millions of /trackingredirect/ links?
-
Awesome, good to know things are all okay!
-
Yes, Google does not appear to be crawling or indexing any of the pages in question, and GWT doesn't note any issues with crawl budget.
-
And everything looks okay in your GWT?
-
This is what my other research has suggested, as well. Google is "discovering" millions of URLs that go into a queue to get crawled, and they're reporting the extremely high number of URLs in Webmaster Tools before they actually attempt to crawl, and see that all these URLs are blocked by robots.txt.
-
Hi Ehren,
Google has said that they send those warnings before they actually crawl your site (why they would bother you with a warning so quickly, I don't know), so I wouldn't worry about this if the warning is the only sign you're getting that Google might be crawling disallowed pages.
What is your Google Webmaster Tools account saying? If Google isn't reporting to you that it's spending too long crawling your site, and the correct number of pages are indexed, you should be fine.
Let me know if this is a bigger problem!
Kristina
-
Federico, my concern is how do I get Google to spend spending so much crawl time on those pages. I don't want Google to waste time crawling pages that are blocked in my robots.txt.
-
There's nothing you need to do. If you don't want those pages to be indexed leaving the robots.txt as it is is fine.
You can mark that in your Webmaster Tools as fixed and Google won't notify you again.
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
-
How to 301 trailing URLs to new domain home page - wildcard?
How would I add a redirect rule so all old domain URLs redirect to a new domain? All the old pages no longer exist on a new website. The domains have been through several CMS platforms, so it would be unnecessary to recreate them. Problem is, they're indexed in search engines from the past 10 years, so it's causing a lot of 404s. Example: search "NARI Tampa Bay" and you'll find 2 old domains: nari-tampabay.com & nari-tampabay.org. The new domain is naritb.org Those 2 old domains are now pointed to the same nameservers as the new and listed as parked domains. Here's the current rules in htaccess: <code>RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.org [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.org [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301]</code>
Technical SEO | | CartoMark0 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/ I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.) However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't. As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority. How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.) Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks. Proof I'm not crazy in attached video. robotstxt_addon_domain.mp4
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Is a Rel="cacnonical" page bad for a google xml sitemap
Back in March 2011 this conversation happened. Rand: You don't want rel=canonicals. Duane: Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error. Is this the same with Google?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
While SEOMoz currently can tell us the number of linking c-blocks, can SEOMoz tell us what the specific c-blocks are?
I know it is important to have a diverse set of c-blocks, but I don't know how it is possible to have a diverse set if I can't find out what the c-blocks are in the first place. Also, is there a standard for domain linking c-blocks? For instance, I'm not sure if a certain amount is considered "average" or "above-average."
Technical SEO | | Todd_Kendrick0 -
Having both <title>and <meta name="title"...> on a web page?</title>
Hi All, Client of mine using reversed Meta Tags format in their website and Honestly i never saw such Meta Tags formats. In my opinion having 2 Title tags and wrong reversed description tag is not correct and the needs to be removed, and other tags need to be changed,too But they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because weird thing is Search Engines are apparently able to index them ,So they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. So should i persist in correcting them or just hope for the best and ignore it?!?!?! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URL"
I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URLs" but all the pages listed have a canonical with a static url , does this mean that I can ignore the warnings? Seems to me that I can but I just want to make sure?
Technical SEO | | Arnx1