Robots.txt usage
-
Hey Guys,
I am about make an important improvement to our site's robots.txt
we have large number of properties on our site and we have different views for them. List, gallery and map view. By default list view shows up and user can navigate through gallery view.
We donot want gallery pages to get indexed and want to save our crawl budget for more important pages.
this is one example of our site:
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm
When you click on "gallery view" URL of this site will remain same in your address bar: but when you mouse over the "gallery view" tab it will show you URL with parameter "view=g". there are number of parameters: "view=g, view=l and view=m".
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=l
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=g
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=m
Now my question is:
I If restrict bots by adding "Disallow: ?view=" in our robots.txt will it effect the list view too?
Will be very thankful if yo look into this for us.
Many thanks
Hassan
I will test this on some other site within our network too before putting it to important one's. to measure the impact but will be waiting for your recommendations. Thanks
-
Others are right by the way canonical may be better, but if you insist on robots restriction you should add two schemas to each parameter:
disallow:?view=m disallow:?view=m*
so that you block the urls that contain the parameter at the end and block the ones that have it in the middle as well.
-
I had a similar issue with my website: there were many ways of sorting a likst of items (date, title, etc) which ended up causing duplicate content, we solved the issue a couple of days ago by restricting the "sorted" pages using the robots.txt file. HOWEVER, this morning i found this text in the Google Webmaster Tools support section:
Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the
rel="canonical"
link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.source:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359I havent seen any negative effect on my site (yet), but I would agree with SuperlativB in the sense that YOU might be better off using "canonical" tags on these links
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/...?view=l
-
For these paratmeters are not at the very end os the url you should add * after the letter of the parameter as well in the restriction
you got my point, thanks for looking into this. Since our search page load with list view by default and it is not in URL but still v=l represents the list view.
I want to disallow both parameters "view=g, view=m" in any URL from bots.
If these parameters are sometimes in between and some time at the end of URL what will be the work around for for both cases, you suggest?
Thanks for looking into this...
-
You can do the restriction you want but if i get it right m stands for map view g stands for gallery view and l stands for list view. So if you want list view to be indexed and map and gallery view not to be indexed you should add two lines of distriction:
disallow:?view=m disallow:?view=g
if these paratmeters are not at the very end os the url you should add * after the letter of the parameter as well in the restriction
-
Sounds like this is something canonical could solve for you. If you disallow ?view=* you would disallow all "?view" on your homepage, if you are unsure you should go for exact match rather that all.
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
I'm getting an error in Search Console that pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. Unfortunately I can't post images on here but I've linked some url's below. The page below in search console shows the error above... https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/ As does this one. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/independent-school-marketing-communications/ However, this page does not have the error and is indexed by Google. The meta robots tag looks identical. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/blog/leadership-team/jill-goodman/ Any and all help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
Robots.txt Tester - syntax not understood
I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
Jim0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Confirming Robots.txt code deep Directories
Just want to make sure I understand exactly what I am doing If I place this in my Robots.txt Disallow: /root/this/that By doing this I want to make sure that I am ONLY blocking the directory /that/ and anything in front of that. I want to make sure that /root/this/ still stays in the index, its just the that directory I want gone. Am I correct in understanding this?
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
Robots.txt
Hi there, My question relates to the robots.txt file. This statement: /*/trackback Would this block domain.com/trackback and domain.com/fred/trackback ? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Robots.txt question
I want to block spiders from specific specific part of website (say abc folder). In robots.txt, i have to write - User-agent: * Disallow: /abc/ Shall i have to insert the last slash. or will this do User-agent: * Disallow: /abc
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Quick robots.txt check
We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neooptic0