Google Adsbot crawling order confirmation pages?
-
Hi,
We have had roughly 1000+ requests per 24 hours from Google-adsbot to our confirmation pages. This generates an error as the confirmation page cannot be viewed after closing or by anyone who didn't complete the order.
-
How is google-adsbot finding pages to crawl that are not linked to anywhere on the site, in the sitemap or linked to anywhere else?
-
Is there any harm in a google crawler receiving a higher percentage of errors - even though the pages are not supposed to be requested.
-
Is there anything we can do to prevent the errors for the benefit of our network team and what are the possible risks of any measures we can take?
This bot seems to be for evaluating the quality of landing pages used in for Adwords so why is it trying to access confirmation pages when they have not been set for any of our adverts?
We included "Disallow: /confirmation" in the robots.txt but it has continued to request these pages, generating a 403 page and an error in the log files so it seems Adsbot doesn't follow robots.txt.
Thanks in advance for any help,
Sam
-
-
Hi Sam,
I can see how this might be concerning. Without knowing your site, I can't confirm anything but answers to your questions:
- Bots have been known to "fill out forms" before and at least Googlebot has been known to find pages through the use of Chrome (a user using Chrome). There are many ways, but if you are sure that there is no link to it anywhere, I wouldn't worry about it.
- No. That is what header codes are there for, to let the bots know what is there, what is forbidden, etc.
- Other than robots.txt, there isn't any way to stop them from sending in requests. If it gets out of hand, you can try talking to AdWords directly, but more than likely, this is not causing an issue.
Overall, I'd just let it happen. Let them get the 403 error and they'll figure it out. As long as this isn't showing in the organic index, you should be fine.
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
-
I'm looking for a bulk way to take off from the Google search results over 600 old and inexisting pages?
When I search on Google site:alexanders.co.nz still showing over 900 results. There are over 600 inexisting pages and the 404/410 errrors aren't not working. The only way that I can think to do that is doing manually on search console using the "Removing URLs" tool but is going to take ages. Any idea how I can take down all those zombie pages from the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexanders1 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Why is my XML sitemap ranking on the first page of google for 100s of key words versus the actual relevant page?
I still need this question answerd and I know it's something I must have changed. But google is ranking my sitemap for 100s of key terms versus the actual page. It's great to be on the first page but not my site map...... Geeeez.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
SEOMOZ crawl all my pages
SEOMOZ crawl all my pages including ".do" (all web pages after sign up ) . Coz of this it finishes all my 10.000 crawl page quota and be exposed to dublicate pages. Google is not crawling pages that user reach after sign up. Because these are private pages for customers I guess The main question is how we can limit SEOMOZ crawl bot. If the bot can stay out of ".do" java extensions it'll perfect to starting SEO analysis. Do you know think about it? Cheers Example; .do java extension (after sign up page) (Google can't crawl) http://magaza.turkcell.com.tr/showProductDetail.do?psi=1001694&shopCategoryId=1000021&model=Apple-iPhone-3GS-8GB Normal Page (Google can crawl) http://magaza.turkcell.com.tr/telefon/Apple-iPhone-3GS-8GB/1001694/.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hcetinsoy0 -
How to make Google forget my pages ?
Hello all ! I've decided to delete many pages from my website wich had poor content. I've made a php 301 redirect from all these old pages to a unique page (not the home page, a deep page). My problem is that this modification has been made a week ago and my position in the SERPs have crashed down... What can I do ? I believe that I'll get up again when Google will see that these pages don't exist anymore but it could take a long time 😞 (these page are in the Google cache with a date older than my modification's date) I've read somewhere that I should put a link to the destination page (where old pages are 301 redirected) but I don't understand how it could help... Can someone help me ? Tell me what I've done wrong... These pages were very poor and I've deleted them in order to boost the global quality of my site... It should help me in the SERPs, not penalize me...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B-CITY0