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.
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
-
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google.
Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS.
They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index?
We don't want these pages to be found.
-
That's why I mentioned: "eventually". But thanks for the added information. Hopefully it's clear now for the original poster.
-
Looking at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0&feature=youtu.be Matt Cutts advises to use the noindex tag on every individual page. However, this is very time consuming if you're dealing wit a large volume of pages.
The other option he recommends is to use the robots.txt file as well as the URL removal tool in GWMT, Although this is the second choice option, it does seem easier for us to implement than the noindex tag.
-
Hi,
Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.
-
Hi Nico
Great response thanks.
This is certainly something I'm taking into consideration and will question my developer about this.
-
Thanks Thomas.
I'm now finding out from my developer is we are able to noindex these pages with the meta robots.
If this is something that isn't possible, it's likely that we'll add to the robots.txt as you did.
Either way I think will be progress to different degrees.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
Completely agree, I have done the same for a website I am doing work with, ideally we would noindex with meta robots however that isn't possible. So instead we added to the robots.txt, the number of indexed pages have dropped, yet when you search exactly it just says the description can't be reached.
So I was happy with the results as they're now not ranking for the terms they were.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.
The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...
At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.
So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)
Regards
Nico
-
Thanks Martijn. This is what I was assuming would happen. However, I got a confusing message from my developer which said the following,
"won't remove the URL's from the index but it will mean that they will only show up for very specific searches that customers are extremely unlikely to use. It will also increase Asgard's crawl budget as Google and Bing won't try to crawl these URLs. Would you be happy with this solution?"
I would tend to still agree with your statement though.
-
Yes they will be eventually. As you disallow Google to crawl the URLs it will probably start hiding the descriptions for some of these image pages soon as they can't crawl them anymore. Then at some point they'll stop looking at them at all.
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
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?
Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0