Application & understanding of robots.txt
-
Hello Moz World!
I have been reading up on robots.txt files, and I understand the basics. I am looking for a deeper understanding on when to deploy particular tags, and when a page should be disallowed because it will affect SEO. I have been working with a software company who has a News & Events page which I don't think should be indexed. It changes every week, and is only relevant to potential customers who want to book a demo or attend an event, not so much search engines. My initial thinking was that I should use noindex/follow tag on that page. So, the pages would not be indexed, but all the links will be crawled.
I decided to look at some of our competitors robots.txt files. Smartbear (https://smartbear.com/robots.txt), b2wsoftware (http://www.b2wsoftware.com/robots.txt) & labtech (http://www.labtechsoftware.com/robots.txt).
I am still confused on what type of tags I should use, and how to gauge which set of tags is best for certain pages. I figured a static page is pretty much always good to index and follow, as long as it's public. And, I should always include a sitemap file. But, What about a dynamic page? What about pages that are out of date? Will this help with soft 404s?
This is a long one, but I appreciate all of the expert insight. Thanks ahead of time for all of the awesome responses.
Best Regards,
Will H.
-
Yup.. also don't forget that robots.txt is just a "recommendation" for robots. they do not obey it
Basically Google does what ever it wants to
Also if you want to block a folder so its inner content wont be "accessed", in case anylink will point to this page, even if its coming from outside of your domain, it will be indexed.. Although the content of it wont be shown on search results but it will show up with a notice stating that the site content is blocked due to the sites robots.txt..best of luck!
-
Great Advice Yossi & Chris. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I will have to dig into the Google Guidelines for additional information, but both of your points are valid. I think I was looking at robots.txt the wrong way. Thanks Again Guys!
-
I completely agree with Yossi here; no need to go blocking that page at all.
I can't really add any further value to the points he has covered but one other part of your question suggested that perhaps you're looking at this the wrong way (and it's very common, don't worry!). Rather than having your site stay as-is and just obscuring the bad parts of it from search engines, the thought process should really around creating a great website instead.
If you're ever considering blocking a page from search engines, the first step should always be "why am I blocking this page(s); could I just fix the issue instead?".
For example, you asked if this might help with soft 404s. Rather than trying to find a way to hide these soft 404s, spend that time fixing them instead!
-
Hi Will
There are some concerns that you have which I do not understand.
Why you want to block News & Events page? If it has unique content and on top of that if it is updated regularly, you have no reason to block access to the page. If it is "relevant to potential customers who want to book a demo" its great. I would definitely keep it indexed and followed.Google explicitly states that you should not block access to a page if you simply want to de-index it/remove it. If the page should not be indexed publicly you should remove it or password protect it (a google suggestion).
About tags, i assume you are talking about meta tags, correct?
There is no need to use any kind of meta tag to signal search engines that they need to index or follow the page, you use it only when you want to limit them not to take certain actions.
Also there is no difference between a static or dynamic page when it comes to tag usage. There is no rules for that. A page perfectly be static for years and still get indexed and ranked very good. (but, well we all know that updating the site is a ranking signal)
If you believe that certain page should be tagged "noindex" it is not because it is not updated within the last month or year. Just for an example: contact us pages, about us pages and terms of use pages. These are super static pages that in many cases probably wont be changed for years.best
Yossi
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
-
Remove Product & Category from URLS in Wordpress
Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please. https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How can I use AMP html on a CMS
I have been trying to research using AMP to improve our mobile speed. We have a whole lot of sites on the same platform managed by a CMS. From what I have read, AMP html can only be used on static pages. Does that mean we would not be able to incorporate this into the html through our CMS? I would like to implement this across all our homepages to test the effectiveness of it if possible, but there is no way to rebuild all our homepages statically. Any advice is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisvogel0 -
URL Re-Writes & HTTPS: Link juice loss from 301s?
Our URLs are not following a lot of the best practices found here: http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls We have also been waiting to implement HTTPS. I think it might be time to take the plunge on re-writing the URLs and converting to a fully secure site, but I am concerned about ranking dips from the lost link juice from the 301s. Many of our URLs are very old, with a decent amount of quality links. Are we better off leaving as is or taking the plunge?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
GoogleBot Mobile & Depagination
I am building a new site for a client and we're discussing their inventory section. What I would like to accomplish is have all their products load on scroll (or swipe on mobile). I have seen suggestions to load all content in the background at once, and show it as they swipe, lazy loading the product images. This will work fine for the user, but what about how GoogleBot mobile crawls the page? Will it simulate swiping? Will it load every product at once, killing page load times b/c of all of the images it must load at once? What are considered SEO best practices when loading inventory using this technique. I worry about this b/c it's possible for 2,000+ results to be returned, and I don't want GoogleBot to try and load all those results at once (with their product thumbnail images). And I know you will say to break those products up into categories, etc. But I want the "swipe for more" experience. 99.9% of our users will click a category or filter the results, but if someone wants to swipe through all 2,000 items on the main inventory landing page, they can. I would rather have this option than "Page 1 of 350". I like option #4 in this question, but not sure how Google will handle it. http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/7268/iphone-mobile-web-pagination-vs-load-more-vs-scrolling?rq=1 I asked Matt Cutts to answer this, if you want to upvote this question. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbyloff
https://www.google.com/moderator/#11/e=adbf4&u=CAIQwYCMnI6opfkj0 -
Page loads fine for users but returns a 404 for Google & Moz
I have an e-commerce website that is built using Wordpress and the WP E-commerce plug-in, the products have always worked fine and the pages when you view them in a browser work fine and people can purchase the products with no problems. However in the Google merchant feed and in the Moz crawl diagnostics certain product pages are returning a 404 error message and I can't work out why, especially as the pages load fine in the browser. I had a look at the page headers and can see when the page does load the initial request does return a 404 error message, then every other request goes through and loads fine. Can anyone help me as to why this is happening? A link to the product I have been using to test is: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ Here is a part of the header dump that I did: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leapSEO
GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
Host: earthkindoriginals.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6653
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-80 -
Forwarding Empty URLs to Homepage for SEO & Old Backlink Salvaging - Is there any value or risk?
Our company owns about 30 URLs that we aren't currently using. Is there any SEO value to be gained by forwarding these content-less URLs to our homepage if they aren't currently indexed by google? Some of these sites were previously in use at low traffic volumes by companies who licensed use of our brand and URL. After parting ways a year or longer in the past, no 301 redirection was done to save the link juice, so it's long gone at this point. However, there may be some sites on the net that are still linking to various pages on the URL. What would be the best course of action to salvage any value of these URLs until they are in use again as full websites? Insights would be greatly appreciated! Cheers, Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayline0 -
Robots.txt unblock
I'm currently having trouble with what appears to be a cached version of robots.txt. I'm being told via errors in my Google sitemap account that I'm denying Googlebot access to the entire site. I uploaded clean and "Allow" robots.txt yesterday, but receive the same error. I've tried "Fetch as Googlebot" on the index and other pages, but still the error. Here is the latest: | Denied by robots.txt |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elchanan
| 11/9/11 10:56 AM | As I said, there in not blocking on the robots.txt for 24 hours. HELP!0 -
Website gone from SERPs - please help to understand why
Dear SeoMozers, My website www.buy-hosting.net ist around for about 6 months. It performed quiet well the first months and for the main keyword "Buy Hosting" it went continously better, until #7 in SERPS of Google. Then, some days ago, it suddenly disappeared and traffic went down to nearly zero. It is not even in the Top 100 for "buy hosting" anymore. Can anyone please advice me, what could be the reason for that and what I could do about it? I'am desperate, beacuse I worked about 8 months nearly 100% of my time on that project... Thank you and kind regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ie4mac0