Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to stop Search Bot from crawling through a submit button
-
On our website http://www.thefutureminders.com/, we have three form fields that have three pull downs for Month, Day, and year. This is creating duplicate pages while indexing. How do we tell the search Bot to index the page but not crawl through the submit button?
Thanks
Naren
-
Hi Dan
What is happening is this - since we have all the months [12], all the dates [31] and years[1921 through 2011] in the form fields, the robot seems to be taking these incrementally and then using the submit button. After the submit button, user is presented with a registration page. While we do want the search to index the rest of the page and the crawl through the rest of the page links we do not want it to crawl through that submit button. I hope I am making sense.
Naren
-
The advantage of blocking a page from being indexed via a meta tag is it is less likely to have unexpected consequences. I've often seen in the past cases where an incorrectly modified robots.txt file leads to a site being blocked by accident.
-
Hi
To my knowledge, you don't stop it from crawling through the button (like a nofollowed link), rather you block the robot at the page it ends up on after clicking submit.
Say the user hits submit and it takes them to mydomain.com/confirm.html On that page you'll want to add;
....if you want it to NOT index the page but follow the links on it.
or
...if you want it to NOT index and NOT follow the links on that page.
Its advised that its better to do this with the meta tag than in robots.txt.
Hopefully I've understood the question correctly!
-Dan
-
Block the pages/folders you do not wish to be indexed with robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /folder1/ Disallow: /folder2/
OR you can add canonical tags to the other pages which are creating 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
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
How to stop google from indexing specific sections of a page?
I'm currently trying to find a way to stop googlebot from indexing specific areas of a page, long ago Yahoo search created this tag class=”robots-nocontent” and I'm trying to see if there is a similar manner for google or if they have adopted the same tag? Any help would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Iamfaramon0 -
How does a search engine bot navigate past a .PDF link?
We have a large number of product pages that contain links to a .pdf of the technical specs for that product. These are all set up to open in a new window when the end user clicks. If these pages are being crawled, and a bot follows the link for the .pdf, is there any way for that bot to continue to crawl the site, or does it get stuck on that dangling page because it doesn't contain any links back to the site (it's a .pdf) and the "back" button doesn't work because the page opened in a new window? If this situation effectively stops the bot in its tracks and it can't crawl any further, what's the best way to fix this? 1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute 2. Don't open the link in a new window so the back button remains finctional 3. Both 1 and 2 or 4. Create specs on the page instead of relying on a .pdf Here's an example page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/mackie-cfx12-mkii-compact-mixer - The technical spec .pdf is located under the "Downloads" tab [the content is all on one page in the source code - the tabs are just a design element] Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Do the search engines penalise you for images being WATERMARKED?
Our site contains a library of thousands of images which we are thinking of watermarking. Does anyone know if Google penalise sites for this or is it best practice in order to protect revenues? As watermarking these images makes them less shareable (but protects revenues) i was thinking Google might then penalise us - which might affect traffic Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
Does a CDN affect search rankings?
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0