When You Add a Robots.txt file to a website to block certain URLs, do they disappear from Google's index?
-
I have seen several websites recently that have have far too many webpages indexed by Google, because for each blog post they publish, Google might index the following:
- www.mywebsite.com/blog/title-of-post
- www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag1
- www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag2
- www.mywebsite.com/blog/category/categoryA
- etc
My question is: if you add a robots.txt file that tells Google NOT to index pages in the "tag" and "category" folder, does that mean that the previously indexed pages will eventually disappear from Google's index? Or does it just mean that newly created pages won't get added to the index? Or does it mean nothing at all? thanks for any insight!
-
Hi William
If the pages in question are
- already indexed by Google then if you block them via the robots.txt , they will show up in search result but the meta description will say something along the lines of
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
2) not indexed by Google for example on a new site , they don't follow it and the pages does not come up in search directly BUT if some external sites link to the pages then they can still come up in the SERP some time down the track.
Your best bet to keep the page out of the public SERP index is the meta robots tag : http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
-
William, If the pages in question are linked to from external resources the robots.txt file will not prevent the pages from appearing in the index. Per Moz's Robots.txt and Meta Robots best practices, "the robots.txt tells the engines not to crawl the given URL, but that they may keep the page in the index and display it in in results.
To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:
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
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Should I use 'Click here' as an inbound link for my cornerstone content?
Hello Should I use 'Click here' as an inbound link for my cornerstone content? Example: For a full selection of our Facebook Event Attendee packages, please click here. OR Example: Please click the following link for a selection of our Facebook Event Attendee packages. This is my product page to help you better understand the context: LikeChimp
On-Page Optimization | | xdunningx0 -
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting). Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
My Site's Name Not Ranking in Google
Hey all, I've seen a few posts like this. But I wanted to start a new thread in hopes I may find the underlying issue. I've had my site: http://www.ctrl-alt-success.com for about 2 years. Recently I've started really adding a lot of content to it. (about 2-3 posts a week). I get zero organic views which is fine as I know it's still in the beginning. But here's my main question. If I type "ctrl-alt-success" into google. I get some site that shows up. "ctrlaltsuccess.com" I've been looking at this issue forever. That site has been "coming soon" for nearly 2 years. lol My site doesn't even show up on the first 10 pages of google. However in Bing and Yahoo it ranks on the first page. What could my site be doing wrong that it's not even ranking for the exact domain name? Keep in mind, if I google "ctrl-alt-success.com" my site comes up fine. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Ctrl-Alt-Success0 -
How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations
We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations. We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows: www.mydomain.com/locations/{location} Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes) The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes". To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this. Option 1 Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path: www.mydomain.com/{area} www.mydomain.com/{state} Option 2 Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path: www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location} (i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes) Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | uBreakiFix0 -
Why will google not index my Images
Hi I've added to index images in our sitemap although they are showing as being submitted Google hasn't indexed a single one. This has been the case for about 3 months. Is there any reason why Google would not index them? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | tidybooks0 -
What's the best practice for handling duplicate content of product descriptions with a drop-shipper?
We write our own product descriptions for merchandise we sell on our website. However, we also work with drop-shippers, and some of them simply take our content and post it on their site (same photos, exact ad copy, etc...). I'm concerned that we'll loose the value of our content because Google will consider it duplicated. We don't want the value of our content undermined... What's the best practice for avoiding any problems with Google? Thanks, Adam
On-Page Optimization | | Adam-Perlman0 -
Why are some of page indexed and others not
I have created a site structure like this: domain/for-sale/brand domain/for-sale/brand-model domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg3 etc.... I cannot understand why the domain/for-sale/brand-model does not seem to be indexed, yet the domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg6 is? This is a new site, but I cannot understand why this URL would be indexed without the others... Any ideas? My home pages has links to the domain/for-sale/brand, this page has links to domain/for-sale/brand-model1, domain/for-sale/brand-model2 etc, each of these pages have links to domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1, domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 etc...
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0