Should you use robots.txt for pages within your site which do not have high quality content or are not contributing a great deal so when Google crawls your site the best performing content has a higher chance of being indexed?
-
I'm really not sure what is best practice for this query?
-
Thank you for your answer John!
-
I would definitely not block these pages. You want to block as few pages as possible.
1. These pages can be used to boost internal links by linking to your important pages.
2. Google crawls thousands of pages...it will likely crawl all your important and unimportant files.
3. You can de-prioritize these page in the XML sitemap, telling the spiders that there are more important pages to crawl.
4. If these are similar pages, then use the URL parameter tool in Search Console to indicate a page might be a filtered version of a more important page.
-
Hi,
Yes you can block such pages in robots.txt. I would also like to let you know that If you don't want to index some pages you can use .
I would go for in your case.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Is it possible to beef up those lower quality pages with better content? If they are important main content pages I would imagine you would want to improve those pages.
However, if you were going to block them I would recommend a tag within the header of those pages.
Hope that helps some.
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Pages not indexable?
Hello, I've been trying to find out why Google Search Console finds these pages non-indexable: https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/eat-drink.html https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/florida-beaches/beach-finder.html Moz and SEMrush both crawl the pages and show no errors but GSC comes back with, "blocked by robots.txt" but I've confirmed it is not. Anyone have any thoughts? 6AYn1TL
Technical SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Does google know every time you change content on your page
What i mean by the question is, so on our home page www.in2town.co.uk we change the article under lifestyle story of the day, if this changes every hour, will this encourage google to visit that page more often or will then just ignore that and just visit each day would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why has Google stopped indexing my content?
Mystery of the day! Back on December 28th, there was a 404 on the sitemap for my website. This lasted 2 days before I noticed and fixed. Since then, Google has not indexed my content. However, the majority of content prior to that date still shows up in the index. The website is http://www.indieshuffle.com/. Clues: Google reports no current issues in Webmaster tools Two reconsideration requests have returned "no manual action taken" When new posts are detected as "submitted" in the sitemap, they take 2-3 days to "index" Once "indexed," they cannot be found in search results unless I include url:indieshuffle.com The sitelinks that used to pop up under a basic search for "Indie Shuffle" are now gone I am using Yoast's SEO tool for Wordpress (and have been for years) Before December 28th, I was doing 90k impressions / 4.5k clicks After December 28th, I'm now doing 8k impressions / 1.3k clicks Ultimately, I'm at a loss for a possible explanation. Running an SEOMoz audit comes up with warnings about rel=canonical and a few broken links (which I've fixed in reaction to the report). I know these things often correct themselves, but two months have passed now, and it continues to get progressively worse. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | indieshuffle0 -
How ro write a robots txt file to point to your site map
Good afternoon from still wet & humid wetherby UK... I want to write a robots text file that instruct the bots to index everything and give a specific location to the sitemap. The sitemap url is:http://business.leedscityregion.gov.uk/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx Is this correct: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
Disallow:
SITEMAP: http://business.leedscityregion.gov.uk/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx Any insight welcome 🙂0 -
Cloaking? Best Practices Crawling Content Behind Login Box
Hi- I'm helping out a client, who publishes sale information (fashion sales etc.) In order for the client to view the sale details (date, percentage off etc.) they need to register for the site. If I allow google bot to crawl the content, (identify the user agent) but serve up a registration light box to anyone who isn't google would this be considered cloaking? Does anyone know what the best practice for this is? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Nopadon
Technical SEO | | nopadon0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0