Clarification regarding robots.txt protocol
-
Hi,
I have a website , and having 1000 above url and all the url already got indexed in Google . Now am going to stop all the available services in my website and removed all the landing pages from website. Now only home page available . So i need to remove all the indexed urls from Google . I have already used robots txt protocol for removing url. i guess it is not a good method for adding bulk amount of urls (nearly 1000) in robots.txt . So just wanted to know is there any other method for removing indexed urls.
Please advice. -
If the pages are already indexed and you want them to be completely removed, you need to allow the crawlers in robots.txt and noindex the individual pages.
So if you just block the site with robots.txt (and I recommend blocking via folders or variables, not individual pages) while the pages are indexed, they will continue to appear in search results but have a meta description of (this page is being blocked by robots.txt). However, it will continue to rank and appear because of the cached data.
If you add the noindex tags to your pages instead, the next time crawlers visit the pages they will see the new tag and remove the page from the search index (meaning it won't show up at all). However, make sure your robots.txt isn't blocking the crawlers from seeing this updated code.
-
There are a few ways to do this.
First, I would use the Google Removal Tool to remove those URLs. More information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en
Then, using the robots.txt file is good, you need to make sure that you're listing the correct URLs or URL path there.
I would make sure that you are using a "410 Gone" in the server header, and not a 404 error. The 410 Gone will get those URLs removed faster.
-
If the target is to get the URLs out of the search engine index than there are the few solutions can work for you:
- The one your mentioned: I think it’s bad to add 1000+ URLs in robots.txt file its make sense for your business.
- Adding meta no-index tag to the pages (if pages physically exist).
Also in order to quickly remove them from the index you can update robots.txt file and then go to GWC and use remove URL feature.
Just a thought!
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
-
Robots file set up
The robots file looks like it has been set up in a very messy way.
Technical SEO | | mcwork
I understand the # will comment out a line, does this mean the sitemap would
not be picked up?
Disallow: /js/ should this be allowed like /*.js$
Disallow: /media/wysiwyg/ - this seems to be causing alerts in webmaster tools as it can not access
the images within.
Can anyone help me clean this up please #Sitemap: https://examplesite.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10 Allowable Index Mind that Allow is not an official standard Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Allow: /catalogsearch/result/ Allow: /media/catalog/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /media/captcha/ Disallow: /media/catalog/ #Disallow: /media/css/
#Disallow: /media/css_secure/
Disallow: /media/customer/
Disallow: /media/dhl/
Disallow: /media/downloadable/
Disallow: /media/import/
#Disallow: /media/js/
Disallow: /media/pdf/
Disallow: /media/sales/
Disallow: /media/tmp/
Disallow: /media/wysiwyg/
Disallow: /media/xmlconnect/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /shell/
#Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: */catalog/product/upload/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt
Disallow: /get.php # Magento 1.5+ Paths (no clean URLs) #Disallow: /.js$
#Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
Disallow: /rss*
Disallow: /*PHPSESSID Disallow: /:
Disallow: /😘 User-agent: Fatbot
Disallow: / User-agent: TwengaBot-2.0
Disallow: /0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Robots.txt and joomla
Hello, I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address )
and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage ( is that useful )
as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful ) any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ? Thank you,0 -
Does Bing ignore robots txt files?
Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk 🙂 Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google? Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Blocking other engines in robots.txt
If your primary target of business is not in China is their any benefit to blocking Chinese search robots in robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Romancing0