Robots.txt Question
-
In the past, I had blocked a section of my site (i.e. domain.com/store/) by placing the following in my robots.txt file: "Disallow: /store/" Now, I would like the store to be indexed and included in the search results. I have removed the "Disallow: /store/" from the robots.txt file, but approximately one week later a Google search for the URL produces the following meta description in the search results: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more"
Is there anything else I need to do to speed up the process of getting this section of the site indexed?
-
Thanks for the "Good Answer" flag, David! I reformatted & added a little extra info to make the process a little clearer.
Paul
-
To help speed up the process of getting re-included, use the "Fetch as Googlebot" and "Fetch as Bingbot" tools in Webmaster Tools for a page in the blocked section - this significantly helps jumpstart indexing of pages.Once you see a successful Fetch status, click Submit to Index, and then specify to submit URL and all linked pages.
In addition
- make certain your new pages are listed in your sitmap.xml file, and then resubmit the sitemap to the search engines using Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
- make sure your own internal pages (especially a few strong ones) link to the newly unblocked content
- see if you can get a couple good new incoming links to some of the pages in the new section - even if they're no-follow, they can help guide the crawlers to the newly available pages
Essentially you're trying to give the SEs as many hints as possible that there are new pages to crawl and hopefully index.
Paul
[edited for additional clarity]
-
Thanks. I figured this was the case, but was not sure if I was missing any "best practices" about getting the previously blocked URL included faster.
-
David, If I am correct this is an old message sitting in the index. Give it another week or so and I am sure this message will vanish. I had this with one of my sites that I went live with but forget to allow in the robots.txt file.
shivun
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
-
Subdomain Question
Having a difficult time on our site and looking for some advice. Our site pages are indexed perfectly, however, we have a subdomain where we have all of our images and PDF's. We only have the main domain set-up in Search Console with our sitemap. We can't seem to get any of our images indexed by Google that are in the subdomain however all the PDF's are indexed. My thought is to add the subdomain to SC and create a new sitemap that is just for the subdomain. Assuming we are not blocking any folders or files with our robots.txt can anyone think of any other reasons why the images wouldn't get indexed.
Technical SEO | | cbathd
Thanks0 -
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
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
How to stop robots.txt restricting access to sitemap?
I'm working on a site right now and having an issue with the robots.txt file restricting access to the sitemap - with no web dev to help, I'm wondering how I can fix the issue myself? The robots.txt page shows User-agent: * Disallow: / And then sitemap: with the correct sitemap link
Technical SEO | | Ad-Rank0 -
Robots.txt on refinements
In dealing with Panda do you think it is a good idea to put all refinements for category pages in the robots.txt file? We already have a lot as noindex, follow but I am wondering if it would be better to address from a crawl perspective as the pages are probably thin duplicate content to Google.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Blocked by meta-robots but there is no robots file
OK, I'm a little frustred here. I've waited a week for the next weekly index to take place after changing the privacy setting in a wordpress website so Google can index, but I still got the same problem. Blocked by meta-robots, no index, no follow. But I do not see a robot file anywhere and the privacy setting in this Wordpress site is set to allow search engines to index this site. Website is www.marketalert.ca What am I missing here? Why can't I index the rest of the website and is there a faster way to test this rather than wait another week just to find out it didn't work again?
Technical SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
Un-Indexing a Page without robots.txt or access to HEAD
I am in a situation where a page was pushed live (Went live for an hour and then taken down) before it was supposed to go live. Now normally I would utilize the robots.txt or but I do not have access to either and putting a request in will not suffice as it is against protocol with the CMS. So basically I am left to just utilizing the and I cannot seem to find a nice way to play with the SE to get this un-indexed. I know for this instance I could go to GWT and do it but for clients that do not have GWT and for all the other SE's how could I do this? Here is the big question here: What if I have a promotional page that I don't want indexed and am met with these same limitations? Is there anything to do here?
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0