Robot.txt help
-
Hi,
We have a blog that is killing our SEO.
We need to
Disallow
Disallow: /Blog/?tag*
Disallow: /Blog/?page*
Disallow: /Blog/category/*
Disallow: /Blog/author/*
Disallow: /Blog/archive/*
Disallow: /Blog/Account/.
Disallow: /Blog/search*
Disallow: /Blog/search.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/error404.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/archive*
Disallow: /Blog/archive.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/sitemap.axd
Disallow: /Blog/post.aspxBut Allow everything below /Blog/Post
The disallow list seems to keep growing as we find issues. So rather than adding in to our Robot.txt all the areas to disallow. Is there a way to easily just say Allow /Blog/Post and ignore the rest. How do we do that in Robot.txt
Thanks
-
These: http://screencast.com/t/p120RbUhCT
They appear on every page I looked at, and take up the entire area "above the fold" and the content is "below the fold"
-Dan
-
Thanks Dan, but what grey areas, what url are you looking at?
-
Ahh. I see. You just need to "noindex" the pages you don't want in the index. As far as how to do that with blogengine, I am not sure, as I have never used it before.
But I think a bigger issue is like the giant box areas at the top of every page. They are pushing your content way down. That's definitely hurting UX and making the site a little confusing. I'd suggest improving that as well
-Dan
-
Hi Dan, Yes sorry that's the one!
-
Hi There... that address does not seem to work for me. Should it be .net? http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
-Dan
-
Hi
The blog is www.dotnetblogengine.com
The content is only on the blog once it is just it can be accessed lots of different ways
-
Andrew
I doubt that one thing made your rankings drop so much. Also, what type of CMS are you on? Duplicate content like that should be controlled through indexation for the most part, but I am not recognizing that type of URL structure as any particular CMS?
Are just the title tags duplicate or the entire page content? Essentially, I would either change the content of the pages so they are not duplicate, or if that doesn't make sense I would just "noindex" them.
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
I am getting duplicate content errors in WMT like
This is because tag=ABC and page=1 are both different ways to get to www.mysite.com/Blog/Post/My-Blog-Post.aspx
To fix this I have remove the URL's www.mysite.com/Blog/?tag=ABC and www.mysite.com/Blog/?Page=1from GWMT and by setting robot.txt up like
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/PostI hope to solve the duplicate content issue to stop it happening again.
Since doing this my SERP's have dropped massively. Is what I have done wrong or bad? How would I fix?
Hope this makes sense thanks for you help on this its appreciated.
Andrew
-
Hi There
Where are they appearing in WMT? In crawl errors?
You can also control crawling of parameters within webmaster tools - but I am still not quite sure if you are trying to remove these from the index or just prevent crawling (and if preventing crawling, for what reason?) or both?
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
The issue is my blog had tagging switched on, it cause canonicalization mayhem.
I switched it off, but the tags still appears in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT). I Remove URL via GWMT but they are still appearing. This has also caused me to plummet down the SERPs! I am hoping this is why my SERPs had dropped anyway! I am now trying to get to a point where google just sees my blog posts and not the ?Tag or ?Author or any other parameter that is going to cause me canoncilization pain. In the meantime I am sat waiting for google to bring me back up the SERPs when things settle down but it has been 2 weeks now so maybe something else is up?
-
I'm wondering why you want to block crawling of these URLs - I think what you're going for is to not index them, yes? If you block them from being crawled, they'll remain in the index. I would suggest considering robots meta noindex tags - unless you can describe in a little more detail what the issue is?
-Dan
-
Ok then you should be all set if your tests on GWMT did not indicate any errors.
-
Thanks it goes straight to www.mysite.com/Blog
-
Yup, I understand that you want to see your main site. This is why I recommended blocking only /Blog and not / (your root domain).
However, many blogs have a landing page. Does yours? In other words, when you click on your blog link, does it take you straight to Blog/posts or is there another page in between, eg /Blog/welcome?
If it does not go straight into Blog/posts you would want to also allow the landing page.
Does that make sense?
-
The structure is:
www.mysite.com - want to see everything at this level and below it
www.mysite.com/Blog - want to BLOCK everything at this level
www.mysite.com/Blog/posts - want to see everything at this level and below it
-
Well what Martijn (sorry, I spelled his name wrong before) and I were saying was not to forget to allow the landing page of your blog - otherwise this will not be indexed as you are disallowing the main blog directory.
Do you have a specific landing page for your blog or does it go straight into the /posts directory?
I'd say there's nothing wrong with allowing both Blog/Post and Blog/post just to be on the safe side...honestly not sure about case sensitivity in this instance.
-
"We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-)" What was the essential point you missed. sorry I don't understand. I don;t want to make a mistake in my Robot.txt so would like to be 100% sure on what you are saying
-
Thanks guys so I have
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/post
Allow: /Blog/Postthat works. My Home page also works. I there anything wrong with including both uppercase "Post" and lowercase "post". It is lowercase on the site but want uppercase "P" just incase. Is there a way to make the entry non case sensitive?
Thanks
-
Correct, Martijin. Good catch!
-
There was a reason that I said he should test this!
We're getting closer David, but after reading the question again I think we both miss an essential point ;-). As we know also exclude the robots from crawling the 'homepage' of the blog. If you have this homepage don't forget to also Allow it.
-
Well, no point in a blog that hurts your seo
I respectfully disagree with Martijin; I believe what you would want to do is disallow the Blog directory itself, not the whole site. It would seem if you Disallow: / and _Allow:/Blog/Post _ that you are telling SEs not to index anything on your site except for /Blog/Post.
I'd recommend:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/PostThis should block off the entire Blog directory except for your post subdirectory. As Maritijin stated; always test before you make real changes to your robots.txt.
-
That would be something like this, please check this or test this within Google Webmaster Tools if it works because I don't want to screw up your whole site. What this does is disallowing your complete site and just allows the /Blog/Post urls.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /Blog/Post
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 anyone help me figure out these sitelinks?
My company is Squatty Potty (yes, of magic unicorn fame) and I recently redid our website's navigation. We're overhauling it currently to rebuild the whole thing, but what is there should give a good idea of site hierarchy to Google I would think. The funny thing is, when you Google [squatty potty website] we do have sitelinks. But when you Google just [squatty potty] we don't. Any ideas on why sitelinks would appear on one search but not the other? I see they appear with [squatty potty logo] as well. I can't figure out how to get them to appear for my brand name search, any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Need help in de-indexing URL parameters in my website.
Hi, Need some help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImranZafar
So this is my website _https://www.memeraki.com/ _
If you hover over any of the products, there's a quick view option..that opens up a popup window of that product
That popup is triggered by this URL. _https://www.memeraki.com/products/never-alone?view=quick _
In the URL you can see the parameters "view=quick" which is infact responsible for the pop-up. The problem is that the google and even your Moz crawler is picking up this URL as a separate webpage, hence, resulting in crawl issues, like missing tags.
I've already used the webmaster tools to block the "view" parameter URLs in my website from indexing but it's not fixing the issue
Can someone please provide some insights as to how I can fix this?0 -
Category 404 Error in Wordpress | Help!!!
Hello Gurus hope everyone is having a fantastic day. Right so I've been pulling my hair with this 404 error on links as such: htttp://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/man-and-van-wandsworth This link appears in the category page clients and the /removals/man-and-van-wandsworth part is the link that should take the user on the Man and Van Wandsworth page in the/ from the footer. However this link and all other links in the footer on these category pages/posts appear to be broken ONLY on this category pages, thus creating 404 errors. And those pages(i.e man and van Wandsworth) are not even categorized. The website is www.manvanlondon.co.uk . We tried various things on Wordpress and nothing is working including non-indexing. Has anyone met this problem before? Is there a way to fix it? Thank you for your time, and hope my explanations make sens. Monica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
Please help :) Troubles getting 3 types of content de-indexed
Hi there,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ltsmz
I know that it takes time and I have already submitted a URL removal request 3-4 months ago.
But I would really appreciate some kind advice on this topic. Thank you in advance to everyone who contributes! 1) De-indexing archives Google had indexed all my:
/tag/
/authorname/
archives. I have set them as no-index a few months ago but they still appear in search engine.
Is there anything I can do to speed up this de-indexing? 2) De-index /plugins/ folder in wordpress site They have also indexed all my /plugins/ folder. So I have added a disallow /plugin/ in my robots.txt 3-4 months ago, but /plugins/ still appear in search engine. What can I do to get the /plugins/ folder de-indexed?
Is my disallow /plugins/ in robots.txt making it worse because google has already indexed it and not it can't access the folder? How do you solve this? 3) De-index a subdomain I had created a subdomain containing adult content, and have it completely deleted it from my cpanel 3months ago, but it still appears in search engines. Anything else I can do to get it de-indexed? Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
I have two sitemaps which partly duplicate - one is blocked by robots.txt but can't figure out why!
Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Help Me find a Great Seo for my Budget!
I am looking for a Good SEO for my tech news site and would like your help in recommending a good SEO that will fit in my budget of 300-500 per month.I have contacted many firms in the Moz directory of recommended firms but found they are out of my monthly price range.Google search for a decent SEO can be scary with so many so called SEO companies.I would like to work with a experienced SEO individual who can come up with a great plan for our site and also implement them.We just had a SEO forensic audit done with Alan Blieweiss and implemented his suggestions and are now looking for someone to work with long term for the rest of our SEO needs.I understand that I cannot afford the top SEO firms or industry leaders but with your help and suggestions I am sure we can afford and find a great SEO. Please reply here or message me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyak0 -
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