Pages getting into Google Index, blocked by Robots.txt??
-
Hi all,
So yesterday we set up to Remove URL's that got into the Google index that were not supposed to be there, due to faceted navigation... We searched for the URL's by using this in Google Search.
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:price=
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:artists=So it brings up a list of "duplicate" pages, and they have the usual: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."
So we removed them all, and google removed them all, every single one.
This morning I do a check, and I find that more are creeping in - If i take one of the suspecting dupes to the Robots.txt tester, Google tells me it's Blocked. - and yet it's appearing in their index??
I'm confused as to why a path that is blocked is able to get into the index?? I'm thinking of lifting the Robots block so that Google can see that these pages also have a Meta NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag on - but surely that will waste my crawl budget on unnecessary pages?
Any ideas?
thanks.
-
Oh, ok. If that's the case, pls don't worry about those in the index. You can get them removed using remove URL feature in webmaster tools account.
-
It doesn't show any result for the "blocked page" when I do that in Google.
-
Hi,
Please try this and let us know the results:
Suppose this is one of the pages in discussion:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blocked-page.html
Go to Google, type the following along with double quotes. Replace with the actual page:
"yourdomain.com/blocked-page.html" -site:yourdomain.com
-
Hi!
From what I could tell, it wasn't that many pages already in the index, so it could be worth trying to lift the block, at least for a short while, to see if it will have an impact.
In addition - how about configuring how GoogleBot should threat your URLs via the URL parameter tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Here's what Google has to say about this. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687
Best regards,Anders
-
Hi Devanur.
What I'm guessing is the problem here, is that as of now, GoogleBot is restricted from accessing the pages (because of robots.txt), leading to it never going into the page and updateing its index regarding the "noindex, follow" declaration in the that seems to be in place.
One other thing that could be considered, is to add "rel=nofollow" to all the faceted navigation links on the left.
Fully agreeing with you on the "crawl budget" part
Anders
-
Hi guys,
Appreciate your replies, but as far as I checked last time, if the URL is blocked by a Robots.txt file, it cannot read the Meta Noindex, Follow tag within the page.
There are no external references to these URL's, so Google is finding them within the site itself.
In essence, what you are recommending is that I lift the robots block and let google crawl these pages (which could be infinite as it is faceted navigation).
This will waste my crawl budget.
Any other ideas?
-
Anderss has pointed out to the right article. With robots.txt blocking, Google bot will not do the crawl (link discovery) from within the website but what if references to these blocked pages are found else where on third-party websites? This is the case you have been into. So to fully block Google from doing the link discovery and indexing these blocked pages, you should go in for the page-level meta robots tag to block these pages. Once this is in place, this issue will fade away.
This issue has been addressed many times here on Moz.
Coming to your concern about the crawl budget. There is nothing to worry about this as Google will not crawl those blocked pages while its on your website as these are already been blocked using robots.txt file.
Hope it helps my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Hi!
It could be that that pages has already been indexed before you added the directives to robots.txt.
I see that you have added the rel=canonical for the pages and that you now have noindex,follow. Is that recently added? If so, it could be wise to actually let GoogleBot access and crawl the pages again - and then they'll go away after a while. Then you could add the directive again later. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en&ref_topic=4598466 for more about this.
Hope this helps!
Anders -
For example:
http://www.sekretza.com/eng/best-sellers-sekretza-products.html?price=1%2C1000Is blocked by using:
Disallow: /*price=.... ?
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
-
Google Indexing
Hi We have roughly 8500 pages in our website. Google had indexed almost 6000 of them, but now suddenly I see that the pages indexed has gone to 45. Any possible explanations why this might be happening and what can be done for it. Thanks, Priyam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
Why do I have so many extra indexed pages?
Stats- Webmaster Tools Indexed Pages- 96,995 Site: Search- 97,800 Pages Sitemap Submitted- 18,832 Sitemap Indexed- 9,746 I went through the search results through page 28 and every item it showed was correct. How do I figure out where these extra 80,000 items are coming from? I tried crawling the site with screaming frog awhile back but it locked because of so many urls. The site is a Magento site so there are a million urls, but I checked and all of the canonicals are setup properly. Where should I start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Robots.txt Disallowed Pages and Still Indexed
Alright, I am pretty sure I know the answer is "Nothing more I can do here." but I just wanted to double check. It relates to the robots.txt file and that pesky "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt". Typically people want the URL indexed and the normal Meta Description to be displayed but I don't want the link there at all. I purposefully am trying to robots that stuff outta there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
My question is, has anybody tried to get a page taken out of the Index and had this happen; URL still there but pesky robots.txt message for meta description? Were you able to get the URL to no longer show up or did you just live with this? Thanks folks, you are always great!0 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Certain Product Pages Not Indexing
Hey All, We discovered an issue where new product pages on our site were not getting indexed because a "noindex" tag was inadvertently being added to section when those pages were created. We removed the noindex tag in late April and some of the pages that had not been previously indexed are now showing up, but others are still not getting indexed and I'd appreciate some help on why this could be. Here is an example of a page that was not in the index but is now showing after removal of noindex: http://www.cloud9living.com/san-diego/gaslamp-quarter-food-tour And here is an example of a page that is still not showing in the index: http://www.cloud9living.com/atlanta/race-a-ferrari UPDATE: The above page is now showing after I manually submitted it in WMT. I had previously submitted another page like a month ago and it was still not indexing so I thought the manual submission was a dead end. However, it just so happens that the above URL just had its Page Title and H1 updated to something more specific and less duplicative so I am currently running a test to see if that's the problem with these pages not indexing. Will update this soon. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GManSEO0 -
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 -
Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss12