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!
-
Thanks for the info above. I think I'll find out if I can cut the text and try to put popup link.
-
Hi Laura
I have not used lazy loading except with images, however I did some reading around and it might be a solution. There is a large section in Google Webmasters that talks about how to make AJAX readable by a crawler/bot so obviously it is not normally readable (Google Webmaster on AJAX crawling).
The other option is to provide a summary on the product page for shipping info and link to a larger shipping info page (as suggested earlier) and get it to open on a new page/tab. At least this keeps the product page open too.
(Note good UX practice recommends you tell the user they will open a new page if they click on the link - this could be as simple as using the anchor text: "More Detailed Shipping Information (opens new page)".
cheers
Neil
-
Here is a tip that I use for my clients and I would recommend. Most CMS / Ecommerce platforms allow for you to put a category description in the page. But, what they do is when the page paginates is they use the same category description and just different products on the page (some use a querystring on the url, others use a shebang, others use other things).
What I recommend to my clients to escape any thin content issues is to point the canonical url of all of the paginated pages back to the 1st category page. At the same time I will add a noindex, follow tag to the header of the paginated pages. This is counter to what a lot of people do I think, but the reason I do it is because of thin content. Also you don't want your page 3 results cannibalizing your main category landing page results. Since no CMS that I know of lets you specify different category descriptions for each pagination of a category it seems like the only real choice. It also makes it where you do not really need to add rel=next and rel=previous to the paginated pages too.
-
Thanks, the info above is quite detailed.
We are not a shipping company those text are just to ensure visitors accordingly. The shipping info is quite long as we want to prompt as mush as we could to avoid customer leaving current page to search.
-
Hi Laura
I am not sure that you can use robots.txt to prevent a search engine bot from crawling a part of a page. Robots.txt is usually used to exclude a whole page.
The effect of the duplicate content on your search engine optimisation depends in part on how extensive is the duplication. In many cases it seems that Google won't penalise the duplicate content (it understands that some content will of necessity be duplicated) - see this video by Matt Cutts from Google.
Duplicate Content is Small (Short Paragraph)
From your question it sounds like you are talking about part of page and it sounds like a relatively small part - I assume you are not a shipping company so the shipping info would be a small part of the page.
In which case it may not affect your search engine optimisation at all (assuming you are not trying to rank for the shipping info).
As long as the content on the rest of the page is unique or different from other pages on the site.
Duplicate Content is Large (but not a page)
If the shipping info is substantial (say a couple of paragraphs or half the content on the page) then Google suggests you create a separate page with the substantial info on it and use a brief summary on other pages with a link to the separate page:
- Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.
(from Google Webmaster: Duplicate Content)
Duplicated Pages
Much of the discussion about duplicated content is more about whole pages of duplicated content. The risk with these pages are that search engines may not know which to rank (or more to the point rank the one you don't want to rank). This is where you might use a rel=canonical tag or a 301 redirect to direct or hint to the search engine which page to use.
Moz has a good article on Duplicate Content.
All the best
Neil
-
Hiya,
First off the main answer is here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
an alternative solution might be use of the canonical tag meaning you're getting all the link juice rather than letting it fall off the radar. I wouldn't be overly worried about duplicate content its not a big bad wolf that will annihilate your website.
Best idea if you're worried about duplicate content is the canonical tag it has the benefit of keeping link juice where as the robots tends to mean you loose some link juice. One thing to remember those is the canonical tag means the pages will not be indexed (same as robots tag in the end) so if they are ranking (or getting page views) something to remember.
hope that helps.
Good luck.
-
Google smart enough to recognize what it is, it won't get you penalized for duplicate content.
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
-
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Do i have my robots.txt file set up properly
Hi, just doing some seo on my site and i am not sure if i have my robots file set correctly. i use joomla and my website is www.in2town.co.uk. here is my robots file, does this look correct to you User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ many thanks1 -
Do I need robots.txt and meta robots?
If I can manage to tell crawlers what I do and don't want them to crawl for my whole site via my robots.txt file, do I still need meta robots instructions?
Technical SEO | | Nola5040 -
When Is It Good To Redirect Pages on Your Site to Another Page?
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
Robots.txt questions...
All, My site is rather complicated, but I will try to break down my question as simply as possible. I have a robots.txt document in the root level of my site to disallow robot access to /_system/, my CMS. This looks like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
Technical SEO | | Horizon
# mail [email protected] for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/ I have another robots.txt file in another level down, which is my holiday database - www.mysite.com/holiday-database/ - this is to disallow access to /holiday-database/ControlPanel/, my database CMS. This looks like this: **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Am I correct in thinking that this file must also be in the root level, and not in the /holiday-database/ level? If so, should my new robots.txt file look like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail [email protected] for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /holiday-database/ControlPanel/ Or, like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail [email protected] for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Thanks in advance. Matt0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0