Robots.txt: Syntax URL to disallow
-
Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs?
Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file.
The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand")
Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ?
I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out
-
You could inadvertently block /brand/ altogether. Just because you use a // doesn't mean Google follows the same rules when crawling.
-
"I wouldn't risk telling a spider to ignore /brand// because it might have adverse results."
Which adverse results could be expected?
-
(because of the 404 error pages being constantly found in our pages)
Think of it this way:
Which is better? Re-routing traffic when it's congested or putting up a road block to back up even more traffic?Yes, it's more work to do the 301 redirects but if you have "pages being constantly found" you should give instructions to spiders to take the different path.
Now, if you are talking about an error such as:
/brand//samsung/13 SHOULD go to
/brand/samsung/13
Then you could EASILY solve this with HTACCESS redirects. I wouldn't risk telling a spider to ignore /brand// because it might have adverse results. -
Hi guys,
Thank you for your answers
I understand (and agree) with your SEO point of view (301 redirection) but I should have mentioned that these old URLs are leading to a 404 error page for a long time now, we are not considering anymore their SEO strength anymore...
My goal right now is to find a quick and simple way to tell search engines to not consider this type of old URLs (because of the 404 error pages being constantly found in our pages) : doing the 301 redirection to the right page would be a bit more complex at the moment.
So: do you think there is a risk that the second slash won't be "considered" in the robots.txt about the "disallow" line I want to add ? (= do search engines will stop to crawl URLs like "/brand/samsung/13" if I add the line "Disallow: /brand//" ?)
-
I'll further what Highland and Alex Chan are telling you. If you are using Apache (Linux) then you can redirect your old site links using a 301 redirect and .htaccess which is a very powerful tool. Otherwise, if you are using a IIS server, web.config is what you want to use.
A really good resource for .htassess is CSS-Tricks: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/301-redirects/
-
Yup like Highland mentioned, using your robots.txt for this isn't a good idea. The robots.txt file isn't guaranteed to work anyway. The only sure fire way to get it working is to move all the URLs from the old structure to the new one, then 301 all the old URLs into the new URLs. The 301 minimizes loss to your SEO.
-
You really don't need a robots for that. I would either 301 the old URL (preferred) or have the old URL return a 404. Both will cause the old URL to be removed from the index. A robots nofollow simply leaves it up but tells the robots not to crawl it.
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
-
Disallowed "Search" results with robots.txt and Sessions dropped
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin
I've started working on our website and I've found millions of "Search" URL's which I don't think should be getting crawled & indexed (e.g. .../search/?q=brown&prefn1=brand&prefv1=C.P. COMPANY|AERIN|NIKE|Vintage Playing Cards|BIALETTI|EMMA PAKE|QUILTS OF DENMARK|JOHN ATKINSON|STANCE|ISABEL MARANT ÉTOILE|AMIRI|CLOON KEEN|SAMSONITE|MCQ|DANSE LENTE|GAYNOR|EZCARAY|ARGOSY|BIANCA|CRAFTHOUSE|ETON). I tried to disallow them on the Robots.txt file, but our Sessions dropped about 10% and our Average Position on Search Console dropped 4-5 positions over 1 week. Looks like over 50 Million URL's have been blocked, and all of them look like all of them are like the example above and aren't getting any traffic to the site. I've allowed them again, and we're starting to recover. We've been fixing problems with getting the site crawled properly (Sitemaps weren't added correctly, products blocked from spiders on Categories pages, canonical pages being blocked from Crawlers in robots.txt) and I'm thinking Google were doing us a favour and using these pages to crawl the product pages as it was the best/only way of accessing them. Should I be blocking these "Search" URL's, or is there a better way about going about it??? I can't see any value from these pages except Google using them to crawl the site.0 -
URL Changes Twice in the Same Year
I've got a new client with a great site, great off-page optimization and some scars and a hangover from a bad developer relationship. I'd be so grateful for your thoughts on this situation: Some time in the not-too-distant-past, the website is established and new content is posted. We'll call this Alpha. In April 2015, the client migrates to WordPress, implementing 301 redirects on every content page because of the capitalization issues of the old CMS. That means Alpha URLs are redirecting to Betas. Problem is, the new Beta WordPress URLs are the the permalink structure: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and update by default when the page content is updated meaning that any updates to existing content cause another 301. It's my belief that for evergreen content, dates in the URL do nothing to help you and might even hurt from a user-experience standpoint, if not a search engine one. So, naturally, I'd like to move to the simple/%postname%/ structure, which would be Gamma. So, here's how I think we should fix it. Step 1: Update the sitemap and navigation and make the desired URL (Gamma) structure the default and the canonical. Step 2: Change the Alpha -> Beta redirects to Alpha -> Gamma Step 3: Add Beta -> Gamma redirects Anyone done this in the past? Anyone have any problems with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Correct URL Parameters for GWT?
Hi, I am just double checking to see if these parameters are ok - I have added an attachment to this post. We are using an e-commerce store and dealing with faceted navigation so I excluded a lot of parameters from being crawled as I didnt want them indexed. (they got indexed anyway!). Advice and recommendations on the use of GWT would be very helpful - please check my screenshot. thanks, B0gSmRu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Issue with Robots.txt file blocking meta description
Hi, Can you please tell me why the following error is showing up in the serps for a website that was just re-launched 7 days ago with new pages (301 redirects are built in)? A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. Once we noticed it yesterday, we made some changed to the file and removed the amount of items in the disallow list. Here is the current Robots.txt file: # XML Sitemap & Google News Feeds version 4.2 - http://status301.net/wordpress-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/ Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap-news.xml User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Other notes... the site was developed in WordPress and uses that followign plugins: WooCommerce All-in-One SEO Pack Google Analytics for WordPress XML Sitemap Google News Feeds Currently, in the SERPs, it keeps jumping back and forth between showing the meta description for the www domain and showing the error message (above). Originally, WP Super Cache was installed and has since been deactivated, removed from WP-config.php and deleted permanently. One other thing to note, we noticed yesterday that there was an old xml sitemap still on file, which we have since removed and resubmitted a new one via WMT. Also, the old pages are still showing up in the SERPs. Could it just be that this will take time, to review the new sitemap and re-index the new site? If so, what kind of timeframes are you seeing these days for the new pages to show up in SERPs? Days, weeks? Thanks, Erin ```
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiddenPeak0 -
Canonical url question
i just search seomoz tooll it say duplicate content for www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.php should i use canonical url for this ? is yes then is this right ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Do I need to disallow the dynamic pages in robots.txt?
Do I need to disallow the dynamic pages that show when people use our site's search box? Some of these pages are ranking well in SERPs. Thanks! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
My URLs are a mess!
Hi all, I am having some SEO done on my website and I have been asked to tidy up my URLs. They show the word 'brand' or 'item' and an ID number in every one. http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/brand/Girl-Skateboards/153/ http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/item/Girl%20Skateboards%20Guy%20Mariano%20OG%20Guy%20Skateboards/898/ My developer says that we cannot remove these words as they 'form part of a routing table' for each url. How do I fix these URLs? Many thanks in advance. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530