Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Digital Marketing
    3. Web Design
    4. Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?

    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.

    Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?

    Web Design
    3
    7
    2339
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Frankie-BTDublin
      Frankie-BTDublin Subscriber last edited by

      Hi

      I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google.

      Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!!

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Frankie-BTDublin
        Frankie-BTDublin Subscriber @AL123al last edited by

        Thanks again AL123al!

        I would be concerned about my internal linking because of this problem. I've always wanted to keep important pages within 3 clicks of the Homepage. My worry here is that while these products can get clicked by a user within 3 clicks of the Homepage, they're blocked to Googlebot.

        So the product URLS are only getting crawled in the sitemap, which would be hugely ineffcient? So I think I have to decide whether opening up these pages will improve my linking structure for Google to crawl the product pages, but is that important than increasing the amount of pages it's able to crawl and wasting crawl budget?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • AL123al
          AL123al last edited by

          Hello,

          The canonical product URLS will be getting crawled just fine as they are not blocked in the robots.txt. Without understanding your problem completely, I think the guys before you were trying to stop all the duplicate URLS with parameters being crawled and just leaving Google to crawl the canonicals - which is what you want.

          If you remove the parameter from robots.txt then Google will crawl everything including the parameter URLS. This will waste crawl budget. So better that Google is only crawling the canonicals.

          Regarding the sitemap, being present on the sitemap will help Googlebot decide what to prioritise crawling but won't stop it finding other URLS if there is good internal linking.

          Frankie-BTDublin 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Frankie-BTDublin
            Frankie-BTDublin Subscriber @AL123al last edited by

            Thanks AL123al! The base URL's (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes) do seem to be getting crawled here & there, and some are ranking which is great. But I think the only place they can get crawled is the sitemap, which has has over 28,000 URLs on one page (another thing I need to fix)!

            So if Googlebot gets to the parameter URL through category pages (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid...) and sees it's blocked, I'm guessing it can't see it's important to us (from the website hierarchy) or the canonical tag, so I'm presuming it's seriously damaging or power in getting products ranked 😕

            In Screaming Frog, 112,000 get crawled and 68% are blocked by robots. 17,000 are URL's which contain "?cgid", which I don't think is too big for Googlebot to crawl, the websites has a pretty good authority so I think we have a pretty deep crawl.

            So I suppose what really want to know is will removing "?cgid" from the robots file really damage the site? I my opinion, I think it'll really help

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • AL123al
              AL123al last edited by

              This looks like the products are being appended by a parameter ?cgid - there may be other stuff attached to the end of each URL like this below:

              e.g. www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid-product=19&controller=product  etc

              but canonical URL is www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes

              These products may have had a canonical to the base URL which means that there won't be any problem with duplicates being indexed. So all well and good.

              Except.....Google has to crawl each of these parameter URLs to find the canonical. In a huge website this means that crawl budget is being consumed by unnecessary crawling of these parameterised URLs.

              You can tell Google not to crawl the parameter URLs in search console (at least in the old version you can). But you can also stop Google crawling these URLS unnecessarily by blocking them in robots txt if you are sure that the parameters are not changing how the page is looking in search.

              So long story short is that is why you may see that the URLS with parameters are being blocked in robots.txt. The canonical version URLS will be getting crawled just fine since they don't have any parameters and hence not being blocked.

              Hope that makes sense?

              Frankie-BTDublin 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Frankie-BTDublin
                Frankie-BTDublin Subscriber @jacobmartinnn last edited by

                Yes, it's in the robot.txt, that's the problem. Someone had to physically put it in there, but I've no idea why they would.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • jacobmartinnn
                  jacobmartinnn last edited by

                  Did you check  your robot txt file? Or check if any plugin creating this problem.

                  Frankie-BTDublin 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • sb1030

                    JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?

                    I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
                    "@type": "Offer",
                    "url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
                    "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
                    "availability": "InStock",
                    "priceCurrency": "USD",
                    "price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
                    "@type": "Offer",
                    "url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
                    "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
                    "availability": "InStock",
                    "priceCurrency": "EUR",
                    "price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.

                    Web Design | | sb1030
                    0
                  • vtmoz

                    Dead end pages are really an issue?

                    Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks

                    Web Design | | vtmoz
                    0
                  • SEOguy1

                    Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?

                    Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version.  I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards

                    Web Design | | SEOguy1
                    0
                  • SEOguy1

                    Problems preventing Wordpress attachment pages from being indexed and from being seen as duplicate content.

                    Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem.  Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
                    to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.

                    Web Design | | SEOguy1
                    0
                  • Kingalan1

                    Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?

                    Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan)  25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space) 
                    15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take 
                    30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space)  High bounce rate
                    3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
                    4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
                    300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
                    300 PAGES  Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words.  My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google  that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan

                    Web Design | | Kingalan1
                    0
                  • jmueller0823

                    Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...

                    A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
                    The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
                    -- This is an Article, Page 1
                    -- This is an Article, Page 2
                    -- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
                    ** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ?  Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01,  /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
                    Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page.  So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter?  I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
                    Thanks much! Jim

                    Web Design | | jmueller0823
                    0
                  • Melia

                    Indexing Dynamic Pages

                    Hi, I am having an issues among others, regarding indexing dynamic pages. Our website, www.me-by-melia, was just put live and I am concerned the bottom naviagtion pages (http://www.me-by-melia.com/#store, http://www.me-by-melia.com/#facebook, etc) will not be indexed and create duplicate pages. Also, when you open these pages in a new tab, it takes you to homepage. The website was created in HTML5. Please advise.

                    Web Design | | Melia
                    0
                  • jmansd

                    Is it necessary to redirect every Error page (404 or 500) found?

                    If I have Hundreds of pages with 404 and 500 erros should set up 301 redirects for all of them?  Some of the pages have external links, some don't.

                    Web Design | | jmansd
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.