Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt
-
Hi Everybody,
We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring:
- Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/"
- Color - For example: ?color=91
- Price - For example: "?price=650-700"
- Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular
- Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704"
- Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/"
My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled?
Any advice would be appreciated!
-
If you are looking to disallow url parameters you could use something like the following as a convention.
Disallow: /? or Disallow: /?dir=&order=&p= if you wanted to be more accurate with specific parameters. There have been a few Moz questions of this type over the last few years, if you do look to remove the parameters.
Also try and ensure that the product pages you have listed are well canonicalised and point to the original product etc. A good review on how to do this can be found here. This will in most cases be enough to remove any indexation/duplicate issues.
-
First I assume you have webmaster tools set up?
They have a robots.txt tester tool which you can test out different parameters to make sure you get the right syntax. For example color would be blocked by: Disallow: /?color=91* and you would follow that similar format more or less.
If you are confused I highly recommend reading through Moz's robots.txt best practices guide before you make any changes. Be sure to test all out in webmaster tools(search console)>robots.txt tester.
Let me know if you run into any problems.
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.txt was set to disallow for 14 days
We updated our website and accidentally overwrote our robots file with a version that prevented crawling ( "Disallow: /") We realized the issue 14 days later and replaced after our organic visits began to drop significantly and we quickly replace the robots file with the correct version to begin crawling again. With the impact to our organic visits, we have a few and any help would be greatly appreciated - Will the site get back to its original status/ranking ? If so .. how long would that take? Is there anything we can do to speed up the process ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jc42540 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OfficeFurn0 -
What are the best practices with website redesign & redirects?
I have a website that is not very pretty but has great rankings. I want to redesign the website and loose as little rankings as possible and still clean up the navigation. What are the best practices? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not. Here are some additional sample links: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Careerbags
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggallini All of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?0 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spiralsites0 -
New URL : Which is best
Which is best: www.domainname.com/category-subcategory or www.domainname.com/subcategory-category or www.domainname.com/category/subcategory or www.domain.com/subcategory/category I am going to have 12 different subcategories under the category
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
XML Sitemap instruction in robots.txt = Worth doing?
Hi fellow SEO's, Just a quick one, I was reading a few guides on Bing Webmaster tools and found that you can use the robots.txt file to point crawlers/bots to your XML sitemap (they don't look for it by default). I was just wondering if it would be worth creating a robots.txt file purely for the purpose of pointing bots to the XML sitemap? I've submitted it manually to Google and Bing webmaster tools but I was thinking more for the other bots (I.e. Mozbot, the SEOmoz bot?). Any thoughts would be appreciated! 🙂 Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110