Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt
-
Hi Everybody,
We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring:
- Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/"
- Color - For example: ?color=91
- Price - For example: "?price=650-700"
- Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular
- Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704"
- Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/"
My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled?
Any advice would be appreciated!
-
If you are looking to disallow url parameters you could use something like the following as a convention.
Disallow: /? or Disallow: /?dir=&order=&p= if you wanted to be more accurate with specific parameters. There have been a few Moz questions of this type over the last few years, if you do look to remove the parameters.
Also try and ensure that the product pages you have listed are well canonicalised and point to the original product etc. A good review on how to do this can be found here. This will in most cases be enough to remove any indexation/duplicate issues.
-
First I assume you have webmaster tools set up?
They have a robots.txt tester tool which you can test out different parameters to make sure you get the right syntax. For example color would be blocked by: Disallow: /?color=91* and you would follow that similar format more or less.
If you are confused I highly recommend reading through Moz's robots.txt best practices guide before you make any changes. Be sure to test all out in webmaster tools(search console)>robots.txt tester.
Let me know if you run into any problems.
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
-
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Robots.txt Blocked Most Site URLs Because of Canonical
Had a bit of a "Gotcha" in Magento. We had Yoast Canonical Links extension which worked well , but then we installed Mageworx SEO Suite.. which broke Canonical Links. Unfortunately it started putting www.mysite.com/catalog/product/view/id/516/ as the Canonical Link - and all URLs with /catalog/productview/* is blocked in Robots.txt So unfortunately We told Google that the correct page is also a blocked page. they haven't been removed as far as I can see but traffic has certainly dropped. We have also , at the same time had some Site changes grouping some pages & having 301 redirects. Resubmitted site map & did a fetch as google. Any other ideas? And Idea how long it will take to become unblocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Robots.txt: Syntax URL to disallow
Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs? Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file. The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand") Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ? I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Search Refinement URLs
My site is using search refinement and I am concerned about the URL adding additional characters when it's refined. My current URL is: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm and when someone chooses their specific year, make, and model then it changes to: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm?searching=Y&Cat=10280&RefineBy_7371=7708. Will this negatively affect SEO for this URL? Will the URL be counted twice? Any help would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Robots.txt file - How to block thosands of pages when you don't have a folder path
Hello.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unity
Just wondering if anyone has come across this and can tell me if it worked or not. Goal:
To block review pages Challenge:
The URLs aren't constructed using folders, they look like this:
www.website.com/default.aspx?z=review&PG1234
www.website.com/default.aspx?z=review&PG1235
www.website.com/default.aspx?z=review&PG1236 So the first part of the URL is the same (i.e. /default.aspx?z=review) and the unique part comes immediately after - so not as a folder. Looking at Google recommendations they show examples for ways to block 'folder directories' and 'individual pages' only. Question:
If I add the following to the Robots.txt file will it block all review pages? User-agent: *
Disallow: /default.aspx?z=review Much thanks,
Davinia0 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0