Not sure how we're blocking homepage in robots.txt; meta description not shown
-
Hi folks!
We had a question come in from a client who needs assistance with their robots.txt file.
Metadata for their homepage and select other pages isn't appearing in SERPs. Instead they get the usual message "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more".
At first glance, we're not seeing the homepage or these other pages as being blocked by their robots.txt file: http://www.t2tea.com/robots.txt.
Does anyone see what we can't? Any thoughts are massively appreciated!
P.S. They used wildcards to ensure the rules were applied for all locale subdirectories, e.g. /en/au/, /en/us/, etc.
-
I can see the meta descriptions in SERPs. do you have any sample pages where it does not show up?
-
According to screamingfrog the current line:
Line:40 http://www.t2tea.com/on/demandware.store/
Is the line on robots.txt is causing you an issue.
-
Hi,
It looks like they are 302 redirecting the homepage to internal language/region specific storefronts but are doing that based on an internal url structure that includes /on/demandware.store/ which is indeed being blocked in the robots.txt. It looks like those urls are then being 301 redirected to the user friendly url you see in the browser so there is a potentially odd redirect chain going on there. The original blocked urls are probably the immediate issue (although the 302 redirects and region/language redirect logic might be putting more complication on top of that).
-
The best way to test this is to head into Search Console and use the Robots.txt tester. If a URL is being blocked, or suspect it is, just add that URL to be tested and it will show you.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598?hl=en
-Andy
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
-
Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!
Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site (into the main site ( different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
Directory where the site was moved (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!0 -
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
Robots.txt and redirected backlinks
Hey there, since a client's global website has a very complex structure which lead to big duplicate content problems, we decided to disallow crawler access and instead allow access to only a few relevant subdirectories. While indexing has improved since this I was wondering if we might have cut off link juice. Since several backlinks point to the disallowed root directory and are from there redirected (301) to the allowed directory I was wondering if this could cause any problems? Example: If there is a backlink pointing to example.com (disallowed in robots.txt) and is redirected from there to example.com/uk/en (allowed in robots.txt). Would this cut off the link juice? Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Interlinking vs. 'orphaning' mobile page versions in a dynamic serving scenario
Hi there, I'd love to get the Moz community's take on this. We are working on setting up dynamic serving for mobile versions of our pages. During the process of planning the mobile version of a page, we identified a type of navigational links that, while useful enough for desktop visitors, we feel would not be as useful to mobile visitors. We would like to remove these from our mobile version of the page as part of offering a more streamlined mobile page. So we feel that we're making a fine decision with user experience in mind. On any single page, the number of links removed in the mobile version would be relatively few. The question is: is there any danger in “orphaning” the mobile versions of certain pages because links don’t exist pointing to those pages on our mobile pages? Is this a legitimate concern, or is it enough that none of the desktop versions of pages are orphaned? We were not sure whether it’s even possible, in Googlebot’s eyes, to orphan a mobile version of a page if we use dynamic serving and if there are no orphaned desktop versions of our pages. (We also plan to link to "full site" in the footer.) Thank you in advance for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
Eric0 -
Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?
Hi My robots file is currently set up as listed below. From an SEO point of view is it good to disallow feeds, rss and comments? I feel allowing comments would be a good thing because it's new content that may rank in the search engines as the comments left on my blog often refer to questions or companies folks are searching for more information on. And the comments are added regularly. What's your take? I'm also concerned about the /page being blocked. Not sure how that benefits my blog from an SEO point of view as well. Look forward to your feedback. Thanks. Eddy User-agent: Googlebot Crawl-delay: 10 Allow: /* User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 10 Disallow: /wp- Disallow: /feed/ Disallow: /trackback/ Disallow: /rss/ Disallow: /comments/feed/ Disallow: /page/ Disallow: /date/ Disallow: /comments/ # Allow Everything Allow: /*
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | workathomecareers0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Changing the relevance of the homepage
One of my new clients is hell bent on changing the content of their homepage. They are one of the world's largest resort companies. The site is graphics-heavy (with embedded text), and barely contains any content. I haven't started any of the on-page optimization yet, but when I do, it will be a major overhaul. Despite the poor on-page of the site, they are getting great rankings and a ton of traffic due to number and quality of their backlinks and domain authority. My concern is this: they want to change the homepage and make it into a "vacation sweepstakes" type of page. Their logic seems to be that they will generate a lot of interest on the site and get people excited about winning an expensive dream vacation, which is all fine and dandy, however, my feeling is that this will change the relevance of the page. So, instead of pitching their ownership-based program, now, they will be promoting vacation contests. So here's the stupid question: would this have the potential to negatively affect their search engine results or the Domain Authority? I'm thinking of suggesting to them a less drastic approach. Perhaps something like the lightbox sweepstakes overlay on marshallsonline.com. At least, this way, we can keep the current homepage and improve on it, rather than going into another niche. Any feedback or suggestions on this is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ollan0