Pages getting into Google Index, blocked by Robots.txt??
-
Hi all,
So yesterday we set up to Remove URL's that got into the Google index that were not supposed to be there, due to faceted navigation... We searched for the URL's by using this in Google Search.
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:price=
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:artists=So it brings up a list of "duplicate" pages, and they have the usual: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."
So we removed them all, and google removed them all, every single one.
This morning I do a check, and I find that more are creeping in - If i take one of the suspecting dupes to the Robots.txt tester, Google tells me it's Blocked. - and yet it's appearing in their index??
I'm confused as to why a path that is blocked is able to get into the index?? I'm thinking of lifting the Robots block so that Google can see that these pages also have a Meta NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag on - but surely that will waste my crawl budget on unnecessary pages?
Any ideas?
thanks.
-
Oh, ok. If that's the case, pls don't worry about those in the index. You can get them removed using remove URL feature in webmaster tools account.
-
It doesn't show any result for the "blocked page" when I do that in Google.
-
Hi,
Please try this and let us know the results:
Suppose this is one of the pages in discussion:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blocked-page.html
Go to Google, type the following along with double quotes. Replace with the actual page:
"yourdomain.com/blocked-page.html" -site:yourdomain.com
-
Hi!
From what I could tell, it wasn't that many pages already in the index, so it could be worth trying to lift the block, at least for a short while, to see if it will have an impact.
In addition - how about configuring how GoogleBot should threat your URLs via the URL parameter tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Here's what Google has to say about this. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687
Best regards,Anders
-
Hi Devanur.
What I'm guessing is the problem here, is that as of now, GoogleBot is restricted from accessing the pages (because of robots.txt), leading to it never going into the page and updateing its index regarding the "noindex, follow" declaration in the that seems to be in place.
One other thing that could be considered, is to add "rel=nofollow" to all the faceted navigation links on the left.
Fully agreeing with you on the "crawl budget" part
Anders
-
Hi guys,
Appreciate your replies, but as far as I checked last time, if the URL is blocked by a Robots.txt file, it cannot read the Meta Noindex, Follow tag within the page.
There are no external references to these URL's, so Google is finding them within the site itself.
In essence, what you are recommending is that I lift the robots block and let google crawl these pages (which could be infinite as it is faceted navigation).
This will waste my crawl budget.
Any other ideas?
-
Anderss has pointed out to the right article. With robots.txt blocking, Google bot will not do the crawl (link discovery) from within the website but what if references to these blocked pages are found else where on third-party websites? This is the case you have been into. So to fully block Google from doing the link discovery and indexing these blocked pages, you should go in for the page-level meta robots tag to block these pages. Once this is in place, this issue will fade away.
This issue has been addressed many times here on Moz.
Coming to your concern about the crawl budget. There is nothing to worry about this as Google will not crawl those blocked pages while its on your website as these are already been blocked using robots.txt file.
Hope it helps my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Hi!
It could be that that pages has already been indexed before you added the directives to robots.txt.
I see that you have added the rel=canonical for the pages and that you now have noindex,follow. Is that recently added? If so, it could be wise to actually let GoogleBot access and crawl the pages again - and then they'll go away after a while. Then you could add the directive again later. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en&ref_topic=4598466 for more about this.
Hope this helps!
Anders -
For example:
http://www.sekretza.com/eng/best-sellers-sekretza-products.html?price=1%2C1000Is blocked by using:
Disallow: /*price=.... ?
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
-
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Robots.txt advice
Hey Guys, Have you ever seen coding like this in a robots.txt, I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you? user-agent: AhrefsBot User-agent: trovitBot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
User-agent: Nutch
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: / User-agent: *
Disallow: /WebServices/
Disallow: /*?notfound=
Disallow: /?list=
Noindex: /?*list=
Noindex: /local/
Disallow: /local/
Noindex: /handle/
Disallow: /handle/
Noindex: /Handle/
Disallow: /Handle/
Noindex: /localsites/
Disallow: /localsites/
Noindex: /search/
Disallow: /search/
Noindex: /Search/
Disallow: /Search/
Disallow: ? I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you?
Any pointers?0 -
Need help with Robots.txt
An eCommerce site built with Modx CMS. I found lots of auto generated duplicate page issue on that site. Now I need to disallow some pages from that category. Here is the actual product page url looks like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nahid
product_listing.php?cat=6857 And here is the auto generated url structure
product_listing.php?cat=6857&cPath=dropship&size=19 Can any one suggest how to disallow this specific category through robots.txt. I am not so familiar with Modx and this kind of link structure. Your help will be appreciated. Thanks1 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
To index or de-index internal search results pages?
Hi there. My client uses a CMS/E-Commerce platform that is automatically set up to index every single internal search results page on search engines. This was supposedly built as an "SEO Friendly" feature in the sense that it creates hundreds of new indexed pages to send to search engines that reflect various terminology used by existing visitors of the site. In many cases, these pages have proven to outperform our optimized static pages, but there are multiple issues with them: The CMS does not allow us to add any static content to these pages, including titles, headers, metas, or copy on the page The query typed in by the site visitor always becomes part of the Title tag / Meta description on Google. If the customer's internal search query contains any less than ideal terminology that we wouldn't want other users to see, their phrasing is out there for the whole world to see, causing lots and lots of ugly terminology floating around on Google that we can't affect. I am scared to do a blanket de-indexation of all /search/ results pages because we would lose the majority of our rankings and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the ranks of our optimized static pages. The ideal is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages - but for some reason Google keeps choosing the internal search results page as the "better" page to rank for our targeted keywords. Can anyone advise? Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Should I robots block this directory?
There's about 43k pages indexed in this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines. Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory? ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0