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.
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
-
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following:
- Checkout
- Basket
Then possibly:
- Price
- Theme
- Sortby
- other misc filters.
What do you include?
-
I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce.
I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load.
- /cart.php
- /checkout.php
- /finishorder.php
- /*login.php
just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds.
- Disallow: /*sort=newest
- Disallow: /*sort=bestselling
- Disallow: /*?page= ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow )
Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche?
Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.
-
Hi,
It sounds like you're going down the right path. Disallow and section of the site that has personal information, as there's no value in having bots crawl that, keep them on important content longer! In addition to Checkout and Basket/Cart, you should also disallow the My Account area if your site has one.
Your next grouping, I'm assuming these are the parameters by which you pages can be sorted. If so, yes, disallow all of those, they're only going to cause duplicate content flags for you in the future. I'm not sure which CMS you are using, but some eComm platforms also have 'email to a friend' URLs that are a major source for dupes and can often be identified and disallowed by another parameter.
Hope this helps narrow it down for you!
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
-
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Add Videos Above or Below the Fold?
We are considering adding videos to thousands of article pages, and were wondering if it would be better to add video above or below the fold? They take up quite a bit of space, and push the article content below the fold--would this hurt us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
We ave a prospect client that wants to start doing SEO for his Shopify site, we are unsure if this will be SEO friendly. Will we have enough control to get great placement? Are we better off rebuilding the site for the client in an OpenCart?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss12