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.
Blocking Standard pages with Robots.txt (t&c's, shipping policy, pricing & privacy policies etc)
-
Hi
I've just had best practice site migration completed for my old e-commerce store into a Shopify environment and I see in GSC that it's reporting my standard pages as blocked by robots.txt, such as these below examples. Surely I don't want these blocked ? is that likely due to my migrators or s defaults setting with Shopify does anyone know? :
t&c's
shipping policy
pricing policy
privacy policy
etc
So in summary:
-
Shall I unblock these?
-
What caused it Shopify default settings or more likely my migration team?
All Best
Dan
-
-
Thanks for your advice Alex, yes i agree, will ask Shopify if this was them (re default settings) or if my migrators have been over enthusiastic but contrary to best practices.
Have a great BH weekend !
All Best
Dan
-
I wouldn't block them. While it's unlikely to affect the rank of your other pages, it may result in a poorer user experience, e.g. if someone were to be searching for one of your policies in Google, it would not be returned.
I'm afraid I'm not an expert on Shopify at all, so I can't answer why they wouldn't have been blocked.
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
-
Difference Between Android Browser & Android Webview
Hello All, In google analytic I can see traffic from android browser & android webview so android webview is also a browser? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dhisman0 -
Google Analytics Question - Impressions & Queries Up, Sessions Down
I'm working with a client who, according to the Google Query report, impressions and sessions are up since we've started work with them about 6 months ago, but Google sessions are down. In moz, we're seeing a gradual, but steady increase in search visibility specifically with Google. Note: this is all organic. From when we started tracking queries, the first month we were tracking there were 43,581 impressions and 690 click throughs for the month. This past month there were 98,293 queries and 1015 clicks throughs for the month (granted not year over year data) - of these 1,015 clicks, 995 of them were from web. However, for those same time periods, sessions from Google are down over 30% - 1,750 vs. 1,189. I'm not sure how to interpret this. I realize that clicks and sessions are not a straightforward comparison, but I would think that if clicks were up according to the query report that sessions would also be up. Is it that some of these clicks are bouncing and therefore not being tracked as a session? Is there a potential issue with how data is being tracked?
Reporting & Analytics | | Corporate_Communications0 -
Migrated website but Google Analytics still displays old URL's and none new?!
I migrated a website from a .aspx to a .php and hence had to 301 all the old urls to the new php ones. It's been months after and I'm not seeing any of the php pages showing results but I'm still getting results from the old .aspx pages. Has any one had any experience with this issue or knows what to do? Many thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | CoGri0 -
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track. After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly. What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
Reporting & Analytics | | BrigitteMN0 -
Big variation in the number of search results. (person's name)
Hi, I have been noticing a really dramatic variation in the number of results Google is returning for the name "Carolyn Hadlock." Most of the time it seems to be around 2000. But then it will jump up to over 10,000. Does anyone know why there would be such a big jump? And then why it would go back? If tested both logged into Google and then not - as well as having others log is as themselves. That does not seem to be it. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
How to get a list of robots.txt file
This is my site. http://muslim-academy.com/ Its in wordpress.I just want to know is there any way I can get the list of blocked URL by Robots.txt In Google Webmaster its not showing up.Just giving the number of blocked URL's. Any plugin or Software to extract the list of blocked URL's.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
What is s.ytimg.com in google analytics?
My clients GA reports 273 visits from s.ytimg.com. I go to the site, it doesn't exist. I googled it, there were some code with s.ytimg.com in it, but nothing I could understand. Anybody have an idea where this comes from?
Reporting & Analytics | | endlessrange0