Googlebot does not obey robots.txt disallow
-
Hi Mozzers!
We are trying to get Googlebot to steer away from our internal search results pages by adding a parameter "nocrawl=1" to facet/filter links and then robots.txt disallow all URLs containing that parameter.
We implemented this late august and since that, the GWMT message "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site", stopped coming.
But today we received yet another. The weird thing is that Google gives many of our nowadays robots.txt disallowed URLs as examples of URLs that may cause us problems.
What could be the reason?
Best regards,
Martin
-
Sorry for the late reply. Feel free to send me a PM. (not sure I can help, but more than happy to take a look)
-
We do not currently have any sanitation rules in order to maintain the nocrawl param. But that is a good point. 301:ing will be difficult for us but I will definitely add the nocrawl param to the rel canonical of those internal SERPs.
-
Thank you, Igol. I will definitely look into your first suggestion.
-
Thank you, Cyrus.
This is what it looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /nocrawl=1The weird thing is that when testing one of the sample URLs (given by Google as "problematic" in the GWMT message and that contains the nocrawl param) on the GWMT "Blocked URLs" page by entering the contents of our robots.txt and the sample URL, Google says crawling of the URL is disallowed for Googlebot.
On the top of the same page, it says "Never" under the heading "Fetched when" (translated from Swedish..). But when i "Fetch as Google" our robots.txt, Googlebot has no problems fetching it. So i guess the "Never" information is due to a GWMT bug?
I also tested our robots.txt against your recommended service http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check. It says all robots has access to the sample URL above, but I gather the tool is not wildcard-savvy.
I will not disclose our domain in this context, please tell me if it is ok to send you a PW.
About the noindex stuff. Basically, the nocrawl param is added to internal links pointing to internal search result pages filtered by more than two params. Although we allow crawling of less complicated internal serps, we disallow indexing of most of them by "meta noindex".
-
Thanks.
100% agree with the Meta Noindex suggestion.
-
It can be tricky blocking parameters with robots.txt. The first thing you want to do is make sure your are actually blocking the URLs. There are a few good robots.txt checkers out there that can help:
You're file is probably going to look something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?nocrawl=1... but this could vary depending on exactly you don't want crawled
+1 to Igal's suggestion of handling these via parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
Finally, if your goal is to keep search results out of the index (it probably should be) then you should also highly consider using a meta robots NOINDEX tag on all search results pages. You can also slap a nofollow on links pointing to search results as this might also help Google steer clear of those pages.
Best of luck!
Edit: Here's what John Wu of Google Webmaster has to say...
"We show this warning when we find a high number of URLs on a site -- even before we attempt to crawl them. If you are blocking them with a robots.txt file, that's generally fine. If you really do have a high number of URLs on your site, you can generally ignore this message. If your site is otherwise small and we find a high number of URLs, then this kind of message can help you to fix any issues (or disallow access) before we start to access your server to check gazillions of URLs :-)."
-
Didn't say it wasn't.
I`m just not sure how these rules apply to parameters, since they are not a part of the "core" URL.
(For example: What happens if I take a URL from your site, change a nocrawl=1 to nocrawl=0 and link to it from mine?
Do you have any URL sanitation rules in place to overcome that or will the page be indexed by Googlebot when it crawls my site and moves on to yours?)Personally, when dealing with parameters, I find it easier to work with WMT so I was offering an easier workaround, (at least for me)
To tell you the truth, I would use hard-coded on page meta noindex/nofollow here (again, as parameters can be so easily manipulated).
-
Igal, thank your for replying.
But robots.txt disallowing URLs by matching patterns has been supported by Googlebot for a long time now.
-
Hi
I`m not sure if this is the best way to go about it.
Robots.txt is commonly used for folder level disallow rules, I`m not sure how it will respond to parameters.
Having said that, there are several things you can do here:
1. You can use WMT to zero in on this parameter and prevent it from being searched.
To do so choose Configuration>>URL Parameters, answer "Yes" to the question about content change and
check-in the 3rd bullet (Only URL with value...) Of course you'll need to choose "1" as the right value.2. If this still didn't solve your issue, you might want to try using htacess + regex to prevent access by user agent.
You can find user-agent information here Googlebot user agent listAlso, you may want to check my blog post about some of the less known Googlebot Facts (shameless self-promotion)
Best
Igal
-
I'll send you a PW, Des.
-
What the domain.?
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
-
Google is Still Blocking Pages Unblocked 1 Month ago in Robots
I manage a large site over 200K indexed pages. We recently added a new vertical to the site that was 20K pages. We initially blocked the pages using Robots.txt while we were developing/testing. We unblocked the pages 1 month ago. The pages are still not indexed at this point. 1 page will show up in the index with an omitted results link. Upon clicking the link you can see the remaining un-indexed pages. Looking for some suggestions. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Tyler1230 -
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net0 -
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt
Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg0 -
Robots.txt
I have a client who after designer added a robots.txt file has experience continual growth of urls blocked by robots,tx but now urls blocked (1700 aprox urls) has surpassed those indexed (1000). Surely that would mean all current urls are blocked (plus some extra mysterious ones). However pages still listing in Google and traffic being generated from organic search so doesnt look like this is the case apart from the rather alarming webmaster tools report any ideas whats going on here ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Robots.txt file
How do i get Google to stop indexing my old pages and start indexing my new pages even months down the line? Do i need to install a Robots.txt file on each page?
Technical SEO | | gimes0 -
Wordpress Robots.txt Sitemap submission?
Alright, my question comes directly from this article by SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/r... Yes, I have submitted the sitemap to google, bing's webmaster tools and and I want to add the location of our site's sitemaps and does it mean that I erase everything in the robots.txt right now and replace it with? <code>User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml</code> <code>???</code> because Wordpress comes with some default disallows like wp-admin, trackback, plugins. I have also read this, but was wondering if this is the correct way to add sitemap on Wordpress Robots.txt. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-...](http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-robots-txt-on-wordpress-site-problem) I am using Multisite with Yoast plugin so I have more than one sitemap.xml to submit Do I erase everything in Robots.txt and replace it with how SEOmoz recommended? hmm that sounds not right. like <code> <code>
Technical SEO | | joony2008
<code>User-agent: *
Disallow: </code> Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml</code> <code>``` Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sub/sitemap_index.xml ```</code> <code>?????????</code> ```</code>0 -
Robots exclusion
Hi All, I have an issue whereby print versions of my articles are being flagged up as "duplicate" content / page titles. In order to get around this, I feel that the easiest way is to just add them to my robots.txt document with a disallow. Here is my URL make up: Normal article: www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345 Print version of my article www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345&printversion=yes I know that having dynamic parameters in my URL is not best practise to say the least, but I'm stuck with this for the time being... My question is, how do I add just the print versions of articles to my robots file without disallowing articles too? Can I just add the parameter to the document like so? Disallow: &printversion=yes I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier... Many thanks in advance. Matt
Technical SEO | | Horizon0 -
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