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.
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
-
Hello!
Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future.
I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt:
User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0My questions:
1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact?
2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?)
I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there.
Thank you for your help!
-
Hello!
Thanks a lot for your feedback and clearing this out! It worked well.
The robots.txt tester is a good tip!
Thanks!
-
Hi,
What you have there will work absolutely fine with a little tweak. And no need to leave spaces between lines.
Disallow: /numberOfStars=0
However, no need to add the wildcard at the end if there is nothing more after that.
The best way to test what works, is before you go and add it to live, use the Robots.txt test tool in Search Console (Webmaster Tools), add in the lines above and then check to make sure none of your other pages are blocked. They won't be, but it's a great way to test before going live.
I hope this helps
-Andy
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
-
Difference between urls and referring urls?
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx) We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions? What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL? What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer? Appreciate the help.
Moz Pro | | ayrutd1 -
Robots.txt blocking Moz
Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites. But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems. We have never come up against this before, even with this site. Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error. Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please? http://www.wychwoodflooring.com -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Is one page with long content better than multiple pages with shorter content?
(Note, the site links are from a sandbox site and has very low DA or PA) If you look at this page, you will see at the bottom a lengthy article detailing all of the properties of the product categories in the links above. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-s/432.htm My question is, is there more SEO value in having the one long article in the general product category page, or in breaking up the content and moving the sub-topics as content to the more specific sub-category pages? e.g. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Button-Head-Socket-s/1579.htm
Moz Pro | | AspenFasteners
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Cap-Screws-s/331.htm
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Captive-Panel-Scre-s/1559.htm0 -
Woocommerce filter urls showing in crawl results, but not indexed?
I'm getting 100's of Duplicate Content warnings for a Woocommerce store I have. The urls are
Moz Pro | | JustinMurray
etc These don't seem to be indexed in google, and the canonical is for the shop base url. These seem to be simply urls generated by Woocommerce filters. Is this simply a false alarm from Moz crawl?0 -
Crawlers crawl weird long urls
I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling:
Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0 -
Page Authority is the same on every page of my site
I'm analyzing a site and the page authority is the exact same for every page in the site. How can this be since the page authority is supposed to be unique to each page?
Moz Pro | | azjayhawk0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | | kdl01 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0