No index tag robots.txt
-
Hi Mozzers,
A client's website has a lot of internal directories defined as /node/*.
I already added the rule 'Disallow: /node/*' to the robots.txt file to prevents bots from crawling these pages.
However, the pages are already indexed and appear in the search results.
In an article of Deepcrawl, they say you can simply add the rule 'Noindex: /node/*' to the robots.txt file, but other sources claim the only way is to add a noindex directive in the meta robots tag of every page.
Can someone tell me which is the best way to prevent these pages from getting indexed? Small note: there are more than 100 pages.
Thanks!
Jens -
Hi Jens
I don't know Drupal but if it's like Wordpress it will add a noindex tag to the page.
Do it for one page then take a look at the code.
Go to the page: right click > View Source
Then go to the three dots top right in chrome and search noindex. It will look like this attached. (ignore the red line crossed out piece)
Best Regards Nigel
-
Hi Guys,
In Drupal between the advanced tags (meta tags), there is an option:
' Prevents search engines from indexing this page 'Do you happen to know whether these tags are seen as valid by Searchbots?
Thanks again guys!
-
For the sake of balance, probably worth mentioning that I'm with David in that I've seen a robots.txt noindex work. It has been relatively recently used by a large publisher when they had an article they had to take down but which Google was holding on to. That's irrelevant nuance in this situation but I think David deserves more credit than he got here.
In terms of this specific fix I agree with Nigel - remove the Disallow and add a noindex (prompt Google to crawl the pages, with a sitemap if they don't seem to be shifting). You can re-add the Disallow if you think it's necessary but once all of the appropriate pages have a noindex tag they should stay out of the index and if they are heavily linked to on the site disallowing them could result in a loss of link equity (it'll stop with the link to the disallowed pages). So if you think you can achieve this with just a noindex you might want to leave it at that.
-
Hi David
I'd rather listen to John Mueller - he has specifically said to not use it:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html
I wouldn't be advising people to use it on that basis whether it has worked for you this time or not. It's not best practice.
That's all. (Sorry Jens!)
Regards
Nigel
-
Thanks a lot for your answers guys!
-
Hi Nigel,
I agreed that what you said is the best solution in this case but noindex can definitely be done in robots.txt.
I'm not sure of the questionable sites you've seen it mentioned on, but I'd consider Stone Temple and Deep Crawl to be reputable sources.
That said, I always like to test things for myself!
I tried robots.txt noindex on one of my own big sports news websites a little while ago because I didn't want to manually set thousands of old posts to noindex. The robots.txt noindex worked fine.
Cheers,
David
-
Hi Jens/David
You should not use a noindex in Robots.txt. You can put it on the page as a robots tag, but not in Robots.txt
I have never ever seen it used in the Robots.txt - I have seen it mentioned a few times on some questionable sites and the odd mention many years ago but it's bad practice in my opinion.
Read more about Robots.txt here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
If you follow what I have said, that is the correct solution.
Regards Nigel
-
Hi Nigel and Jens,
Just to clarify - noindex is valid in robots.txt for Google but it's not recognized by Bing.
Here's a case study by Stone Temple on using noindex in robots.txt: https://www.stonetemple.com/does-google-respect-robots-txt-noindex-and-should-you-use-it/
From their case study, it was found to be pretty effective, but not 100%. It would be a good solution for large websites, but if you're only looking at 100+ pages I would do as Nigel said above and implement the meta robots noindex tags.
Cheers,
David
-
Hi Jens
You can't add a noindex in the Robots.txt file.
Firstly you need to add a noindex tag to all of the pages in the /node/ directory.
Then remove the nofollow directive in the Robots.txtYou need to do this for Google to see the noindex tags!
If you have a noindex tag and a nofollow then the directory is blocked so Google can't see the tags!
Once all the pages have gone from search then add the nofollow back to the Robots.txt file so that Google doesn't waste crawl budget trying to index them.
This will solve your problem.
Regards
Nigel
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
-
Hreflang tag implementation
Hi Mozzers, For an international client, we want to install hreflang tags for 3 different languages for their website in Belgium: dutch, french and english. The dutch version (nl-be) and the french version (fr-be) can perfectly be installed, but our developer has troubles implementing the english version (en-be). According to ISO 639-1 , "en-be" is apparently not supported. Unfortunately, we can't generalize the hreflang tags (), because our client has different websites in each country, so we need to specifically target Belgium here. Does anyone have a solution? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Index bloating issue
Hello, In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score. While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots. At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages. But the number has not gone down. I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month. Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Saison0 -
Homepage indexation issue
Hello all, I've been scratching my head about this one for a while now... Let me explain the situation. I'm working on a multi-lingual website. Visitors are redirected (301) when they visit the homepage to the correct domain.com/en/default.html, domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/fr/default.html or domain.com/de/default.html based on browser language. I have doubts about the impact on the ability for Google to index the website because of that, but that's a problem for another day. The problem I'm having right now, is that domain.com/nl/default.html, domain.com/de/default.html and domain.com/fr/default.html are all indexed. When I search for the URL in Google I get the correct page on number one so I'm pretty sure those are indexed correctly. When I search for domain/en/default.html though, the homepage appears without /en/default.html extension. Does this mean Google assumes the domain.com page is the same as domain.com/en/default.html even though the redirect that's in place? Would be great if someone could shed some light on this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | buiserik0 -
Indexing a catalogue
A client of mine has a large printed product catalogue that they post on their website as a pdf. Should I take a different approach of posting this catalogue in order to gain SEO value?
Technical SEO | | garymeld0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Is it terrible to not have robots.txt ?
I was under the impression that you really should have a robots.txt page, and not having one is pretty bad. However, hubspot (which I'm not impressed with) does not have the capability of properly implementing one. Will this hurt the site?
Technical SEO | | StandUpCubicles1 -
Using the Canonical Tag
Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0