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.
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
-
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages).
Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
-
Me too. It was that video that helped to clear things up for me. Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag. It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.
-
Good stuff. I was always under the impression they still crawled them (otherwise, how would you know if the block was removed).
-
Take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
to see what I am talking about.
Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.
-
Robots.txt prevents indexation, not crawling. The good news is that Googlebot stops crawling 404s.
-
Just a couple of under the hood things to check.
-
Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.
-
This may be a timing issue. Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?
If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue. If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it found.
-
I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association. In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page. You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.
-
If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do. Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it"
Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors. Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index. It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Block session id URLs with robots.txt
Hi, I would like to block all URLs with the parameter '?filter=' from being crawled by including them in the robots.txt. Which directive should I use: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Disallow: ?filter= or User-agent: *
Disallow: /?filter= In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary? Thanks!1 -
Robots.txt & Disallow: /*? Question!
Hi, I have a site where they have: Disallow: /*? Problem is we need the following indexed: ?utm_source=google_shopping What would the best solution be? I have read: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: ?utm_source=google_shopping
Disallow: /*? Any ideas?0 -
Paginated Pages Which Shouldnt' Exist..
Hi I have paginated pages on a crawl which shouldn't be paginated: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs My crawl shows: <colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=3 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=4 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=5 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=6 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=7 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=8 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=9 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=11 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=12 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=13 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=14 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=15 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=16 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=17 | Where is this coming from? Thank you0 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0