CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
-
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases.
It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt?
Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL.
Thanks!
Scott
-
It sounds like you got a hold of the problem.
Verify the subdomains in WMT
Block the CDN subdomains with robots.txt
Request site removal in WMT for the subdomains
make the canonicals absolute
Keep the blocked subdomains in WMT, when you log in you will see a message by the subdomains saying "Critical issue with your site" which is just telling you that the site is blocked.. I like to keep it in there so I can see it's still blocked.
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
-
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Google only indexed 19/94 images
I'm using Yoast SEO and have images (attachments) excluded from sitemaps, which is the recommended method (but could this be wrong?). Most of my images are in my posts; here's the sitemap for posts: https://edwardsturm.com/post-sitemap.xml I also appear on p1 for some good keywords, and my site is getting organic traffic, so I'm not sure why the images aren't being indexed. Here's an example of a well performing article: https://edwardsturm.com/best-games-youtube-2016/ Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Edward_Sturm0 -
GWT Images Indexing
Hi guys! How does normally take to get Google to index the images within the sitemap? I recently submitted a new, up to date sitemap and most of the pages have been indexed already, but no images have. Any reason for that? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Removing a staging area/dev area thats been indexed via GWT (since wasnt hidden) from the index
Hi, If you set up a brand new GWT account for a subdomain, where the dev area is located (separate from the main GWT account for the main live site) and remove all pages via the remove tool (by leaving the page field blank) will this definately not risk hurting/removing the main site (since the new subdomain specific gwt account doesn't apply to the main site in any way) ?? I have a new client who's dev area has been indexed, dev team has now prevented crawling of this subdomain but the 'the stable door was shut after the horse had already bolted' and the subdomains pages are on G's index so we need to remove the entire subdomain development area asap. So we are going to do this via the remove tool in a subdomain specific new gwt account, but I just want to triple check this wont accidentally get main site removed too ?? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
A site is not being indexed by Google Yahoo or Bing
This site - http://adoptionconnection.org/ is not being indexed by any of the search engines. I checked the easy stuff - robots text is: <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">all, index, follow</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noydir</a>" /> I have checked what I can determine would cause the issue but have found nothing to prevent it from being indexed. I'm thinking it may be re-directs etc. Any answer would be great. Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Intergen0 -
Google + button
Hi everyone, just noticed the default new red button go onto my website. Is there anyway to go back to the blue button or customise it? it doesn't really fit in with our colour sceheme 😞 Thanks, any info much appreciated as always.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Bing indexing
Hello, people~ I want to discuss about Bing indexation. I have a new web site which opened about 3 months ago. Google has no problem to index my site and all pages within the site indexed by Google. However, Bing and Yahoo is different story. I used manual submission, Bing webmaster tool to let Bing know about the site. However, Bing is not indexing my site yet. I researched about it and found that my site should have some external links before I get index by Bing. I check external links of my site with Google webmaster tool, SEOmoz tool and "link:" on Google. All tools show different number as below. Google webmaster Tool : more than 50 SEMoz site explorer : 5 link: on Google: none Why all method of checking links are different and which on should most depend on? Also how many links should I have in order to get index by Bing? Could you people please share your opinion?
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Google indexing directory folder listing page
Google somehow managed to find several of our images index folders and decided to include them into their index. Example: websitesite.com/category/images/ is what you'll see when doing a site:website.com search. So, I have two-part question: 1) Does this hurt our site's ability to rank in any way?
Technical SEO | | invision
Because all Google sees is just a directory listing page with a bunch of links to images in the folder. 2) If there could be any negative effect, what is the best way to get these folders out of Google's index?
I could block via robots.txt, but I'm afraid it will also block all the images in that folder from being indexed in Google image search. I could also turn off directory listing in cpanel / htaccess, but then that gives is a 403 forbidden. Will this hurt the site in anyway and would it prevent Google from indexing the images in the directory? Thanks,
Tony0