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.
Removing CSS & JS Files from Index
-
Hi,
Google has indexed a few .CSS and .JS files that belong to our WordPress plugins and themes. I had them blocked via robots, but realized this doesn't prevent indexation (and can likely hurt us since Google wants to access these files).
I've since removed the robots instructions, submitted a removal request via Search Console, but want to make sure they don't come back.
Is there a way to put a noindex tag within .CSS and .JS files? Or should I do something with .htaccess instead?
-
I figured .htaccess would be the best route. Thank you for researching and confirming. I appreciate it.
-
Hi Tim,
Assigning a noindex tag to these files will not block them, only prevent them from showing in SERPs. This is the intended goal and the reason I deleted my robots.txt file which prevented crawling.
-
There's quite a big difference between crawling directives, which block and indexing directives. This article by (former?) Moz user S_ebastian_ is a good foundation read.
This article at developers.google.com is a good second read. If I'm understanding it right, Google thinks in terms of crawling directives vs indexing / serving directives.
My attempt at <tl rl="">:</tl>
crawling = looking, using in any way :: controlled via robots.txt
indexing / serving = indexing, archiving, displaying snippets in results, etc :: controlled via html meta tags or web server htaccess (or similar for other web servers).
I'm not convinced yet, that asking for noindex via htaccess causes the same sort of grief that deny in robots.txt causes.
-
I would seriously think again when it comes to blocking/no-indexing your CSS and JS files - Google has in the past stated that if they cannot fully render your site properly then this could lead to poorer rankings.
You will also likely get notifications in your Search Console as errors for this too.
Check out this great article from July this year which goes into more details.
-
I haven't encountered undesirable .css or .js indexing myself (yet), but as you surmised, maybe this htaccess directive might be worth trying?
<filesmatch ".(txt|log|xml|css|js)$"="">Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"</filesmatch>
Google seems to support it
-
Unless I'm severely misreading the links provided, which I've read before, it seems Google is stating that they read, render, and sometimes index .CSS and .JS files. Here's an article written a week after the second article you posted.
The aforementioned WordPress plugin and theme files hosted on my server are indeed showing up in Google SERPs.
I do not want to prevent Googlebot from reaching these files as they're needed for optimal site performance, but I do want them to be no-indexed. Thus, I don't want robots.txt to prevent crawling, only indexing.
Let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
-
TL;DR - You're hesitated about problem that doesn't exist.
Googlebot doesn't index CSS or JS files. They index text files, HTML, PDF, DOC, XLS, etc. But doesn't index style sheets or javascript files.
All you need in WordPress is to create blank robots.txt file where WP is installed with this content:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://site/sitemap-file-name.xmlAnd that's all. This is explain many times:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.bg/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.bg/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Discovered - currently not indexed issue
Hello all, We have a sitemap with URLs that have mostly user generated content. Profile Overview section. Where users write about their services and some other things. Out of 46K URLs, only 14K are valid according to search console and 32K URLs are excluded. Out of these 32K, 28K are "Discovered - currently not indexed". We can't really update these pages as they have user generated content. However we do want to leverage all these pages to help us in our SEO. So the question is how do we make all of these pages indexable? If anyone can help in the regard, please let me know. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | akashkandari0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Removing Media from Wordpress
I've run the seomoz on page report and found an interesting issue. I'm using wordpress and it seems that every picture I add to my articles seem to be added as separate pages to the site. I'm having to go to each and every picture and creating a meta tag and description to it. I still get duplicate content issues with the same. On my Disqus system, I get the same pictures added just as a page or article would look like. What can I do to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | emasaa0 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
Websites being hacked & duplicated, what should we do?
Hi, please help! Our website was hacked and being totally duplicated. They even injected codes to intercept our orders. Although the codes issue had been solved, still there're two mirror sites out there. When search for some of our key words, they even have good ranks. What exactly can we do to let Google ban those two sites. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0