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.
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/
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your reply!
Unfortunately the problem is yet to be fixed, I hope that my disallow will work shortly.
It seems that most of the index.php links to each other internally (and from old /index.php/ pages that no longer exist), which is super weird. How google found them does not make any sense to me.
I don't beleive that external sources are linking to these pages either - I mean, how would they find these links anyway?.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Like Chris, I spidered your site and couldn't find any links to /index.php files, which probably indicates one of two things:
- You've fixed the problem - Yay!
- Or Google is finding those links from external sources
- Google found those links at one time in the past, and is still trying to crawl them.
In the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, if you click on the link of each 404, there's often a "linked from" source where you can see where Google discovered the broken link. This is really helpful in rooting out the cause.
Regardless, I'm going to go with #1 and optimistically believe that you were able to fix the problem.
-
If I spider your site I'm not seeing any /index.php urls. Does that mean you did get Joomla to cooperate with your rewriting?
Or was your problem that you'd previously had urls indexed with /index.php/ paths and you needed to remove them?
-
Hi Mikkel, I have checked your robots.txt, it looks perfect. If you redirect /index.php to home page that using httaccess file or by using any joomla plugin that would great for you. And its also a permanent solution.
-
Well, I tried the sensible solution and redirecting to the correct URL instead. However the SEF program is quite limited and keep on creating new URLs regardless of my modification. Im looking for a more permanent solution, and the disallow seems at bit simple as I'm not a super programmer.
By the way - thanks for quick replys, kudos to both of you!
-
Sure, the website in question is www.vauni.dk
I don't think that there is any inbound links to the index.php pages. They are not easily found.
-
Couldn't you rewrite those /index.php/ urls to remove the /index.php/?
Like this in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Only used Joomla once, but there must be a way to configure joomla to just use "/" instead of "/index.php/"?
Update:
Here's a solution to your /index.php/ issue:
http://www.eprcreations.com/remove-index-php-from-joomla-urls/
Once you've updated that, and have your urls working properly without the /index.php/, you could add this slight modification of the rewrite rule above so that all your old /index.php/ urls would be 301'd to your new ones:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,L]
Put it underneath the RewriteBase / line they describe in that post.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Do you inbound link pointing to you index.php pages ? If yes, then it might affect your seo. Disallow: /index.ph/ is perfect but after implementing it don't inter link those index.php pages. Can you share me your website URL so that I can show you with example. How to do it.
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 indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
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 -
No indexing url including query string with Robots txt
Dear all, how can I block url/pages with query strings like page.html?dir=asc&order=name with robots txt? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1