Blocking https from being crawled
-
I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue
www.example.com will be my domain
In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login
If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff?
The redirect part is what I am questioning.
-
Correct once /login gets redirected to https://www.example.com/login all nav links etc are https
What I ended up doing was blocking /login in robots and now doing canonicals on https as well as nofollow the /login link that is in the nav that redirects
Willl see what happens now.
-
So, the "/login" page gets redirected to https: and then every link on that page goes secure and Google crawls them all? I think blocking the "/login" page is a perfectly good way to go here - cut the crawl path, and you'll cut most of the problem.
You could request removal of "/login" in Google Webmaster Tools, too. Sometimes, I find that Robots.txt isn't great at removing pages that are already indexed. I would definitely add the canonical as well, if it's feasible. Cutting the path may not cut the pages that have already been indexed with https:.
Sorry, I'd actually reverse that:
(1) Add the canonicals, and let Google sweep up the duplicates
(2) A few weeks later, block the "/login" page
Sounds counter-intuitive, but if you block the crawl path to the https: pages first, then Google won't crawl the canonical tags on those versions. Use canonical to clean up the index, and then block the page to prevent future problems.
-
Gotcha. Yea I commented above how I was going to add a canonical as well as a noindex in the meta but was curious how it handled the redirect that was happening.
thanks for your help
-
Yea I was going to nofollow the link in the nav and add a meta tag but was curious how the robots file would handle this since the url is a redirect.
Thanks for your input
-
The pages that are being crawled under https, are the same pages available under http as well ? If yes, can you just add a canonical tag on these pages to go to the http version. That should fix it. And if your login page is the entry point, your fix will help as well. But then as Rebekah said, what if somebody is linking to your https page. I would suggest you look into making a canonical tag on these pages to http if that makes sense and is doable.
-
You can disallow the https portion in robots.txt, but remember robots.txt isn't always a sure fire way of not getting an area of your site crawled. If you have other important content to crawl from the secured page, be careful you are not blocking robots from there.
If this is linked to other places on the web, and the link doesn't include no-follow, search engines may still crawl the page. Can you change the link in your navigation to no-follow as well? I would also add a meta noindex tag to the page itself, and a canonical tag to the https version.
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
-
What is a good crawl budget?
Hi Community! I am in the process of updating sitemaps and am trying to obtain a standard for what is considered "strong" crawl budget? Every documentation I've found includes how to make it better or what to watch out for. However, I'm looking for an amount to obtain for (ex: 60% of the sitemap has been crawled, 100%, etc.)
Technical SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?
Hello Moz, I need urgent help. I remove a tonne of product pages and put everything into one product page to deal with duplicate content. I thought this was a good thing to do until I got an email from Google saying: "Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on ****.com that return a 404 (not found) error. " I checked it out and found the problem: 4 Soft 404's
Technical SEO | | crocman
41 Not Found's What do I need to do to fix this? Is it a problem or should I just ignore? I removed all the pages on WordPress but I need to do it somehow manually through Google? I have worked so hard on my SERP's that this will destroy me if I'm penalised. Please can someone advise?0 -
Crawl depth and www
I've run a crawl on a popular amphibian based tool, just wanted to confirm... should http://www.homepage be at crawl depth 0 or 1? The audit shows http://homepage at level 0 and http://www.homepage at level 1 through a redirect. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Focus-Online-Management0 -
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
Hi, I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example: This is a page of a hotel in booking.com: http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
Technical SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Responsive web design has a crawl error of redirecting to HTTP instead of HTTPS ? is this because of the new update of google that appreciates the HTTPs more?
We at yamsafer.me are using a Repsonsive web design! A crawl errors occured which redirects the hompage to an HTTP version instead of HTTPS? Any ideas on why this happened?
Technical SEO | | Yamsafer.com0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Crawl Tool Producing Random URL's
For some reason SEOmoz's crawl tool is returning duplicate content URL's that don't exist on my website. It is returning pages like "mydomain.com/pages/pages/pages/pages/pages/pricing" Nothing like that exists as a URL on my website. Has anyone experienced something similar to this, know what's causing it, or know how I can fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0 -
Google crawl index issue with our website...
Hey there. We've run into a mystifying issue with Google's crawl index of one of our sites. When we do a "site:www.burlingtonmortgage.biz" search in Google, we're seeing lots of 404 Errors on pages that don't exist on our site or seemingly on the remote server. In the search results, Google is showing nonsensical folders off the root domain and then the actual page is within that non-existent folder. An example: Google shows this in its index of the site (as a 404 Error page): www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/MQnjO/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp The actual page on the site is: www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp Google is showing the folder MQnjO that doesn't exist anywhere on the remote. Other pages they are showing have different folder names that are just as wacky. We called our hosting company who said the problem isn't coming from them... Has anyone had something like this happen to them? Thanks so much for your insight!
Technical SEO | | ILM_Marketing
Megan0