Bloking pages in roborts.txt that are under a redirected subdomain
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a lot of Marketo landing pages that I don't want to show in SERP. Adding the noindex meta tag for each page will be too much, I have thousands of pages.
Blocking it in roborts.txt could have been an option, BUT, the subdomain homepage is redirected to my main domain (with a 302) so I may confuse search engines ( should they follow the redirect or should they block)
marketo.mydomain.com is redirected to www.mydomain.com
disallow: / (I think this will be confusing with the redirect)
I don't have folders, all pages are under the subdomain, so I can't block folders in Robots.txt also
Would anyone had this scenario or any suggestions?
I appreciate your thoughts here.
Thank you
Rachel
-
Thank you so much for you answer!
the home page in the subdomain is redirected but none of the actual pages in the subdomain are, and because there are so many of them, it would be easier to block them in robots.txt, even if there is small change that Google will still index them. But because the home page is redirected, I don't want to confuse Google with a Disallow: /
Could I do Disallow: / and then Allow: /homepage.html
-
Under usual circumstances, Google won't index redirecting addresses which it considers to be a shallow form of 'doorway' page (Google doesn't like to rank those). If I am reading your post right, no pages on the redirected sub-domain can be visited as they all now redirect. Google should start dropping those old URLs from its index automatically. It's important to note that you should be using 301s to eventually de-index the old URLs. If you're using 302s then you're telling Google that the old pages are only being redirected temporarily and they will return (which could mess with indexation)
If I am reading your post wrong and some pages are still live on the old subdomain and are not redirecting, and you want Google to redirect most addresses but some are staying (for whatever reason) and you still want to de-index those specific ones, Meta no-index (sorry) really is your best bet! Robots.txt tells Google not to crawl a page but it doesn't tell Google not to index a URL if external metrics (inbound links) are strong enough. Both are 'directives' and Google is forced to obey neither
I think from what you are saying, I'd just leave the redirects and let Google do its work. Make sure they're 301s, though. You're right that Robots.txt might end up confusing things. Robots.txt can also sometimes 'kill' the SEO authority of a page. If you did that for all the redirecting pages, no equity would flow through your 301s (hazardous)
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
-
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
Redirect them to some other related pages in your website
dear sir, i found 404 errors in my google adsense account as well google webmaster tool. how can i escape from these errors. and also tell me why can i increase google click rate. my google rate is so low.
Technical SEO | | learningall0 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Subdomain for a blog
My client has a site hosted with a company that allows very little customization including I am unable to add a blog to the site. As he has a fair amount of time & money invested in the site, he is reluctant to start over. So my question is this. His blog is currently hosted off site, would it benefit him if I had them add a cname or a record to show his blog at blog.mydomain.com? Or does Google recognize that it is still a separate site and treat it as such? Finally does it matter how they set it up cname, a record or redirect? This is definitely not my area of expertise (if that is not already obvious from the question!). Thanks for your help! Matthew
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0 -
Secondary Pages Indexed over Primary Page
I have 4 pages for a single product Each of the pages link to the Main page for that product Google is indexing the secondary pages above my preferred landing page How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0