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.
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
-
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed.
I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page.
The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling.
Which is the better practice?
-
@aspenfasteners To my understanding, disallowing a page or folder in robots.txt does not remove pages from Google's index. It merely gives a directive to not crawl those pages/folders. In fact, when pages are accidentally indexed and one wants to remove them from the index, it is important to actually NOT disallow them in robots.txt, so that Google can crawl those pages and discover the meta NOINDEX tags on the pages. The meta NOINDEX tags are the directive to remove a page from the index, or to not index it in the first place. This is different than a robots.txt directive, whcih is intended to allow or disallow crawling. Crawling does not equal indexing.
So, you could keep the pages indexable, and simply block them in your robots.txt file, if you want. If they've already been indexed, they should not disappear quickly (they might, over time though). BUT if they haven't been indexed yet, this would prevent them from being discovered.
All of that said, from reading your notes, I don't think any of this is warranted. The speed at which Google discovers pages on a website is very fast. And existing indexed pages shouldn't really get in the way of new discovery. In fact, they might help the category pages be discovered, if they contain links to the categories.
I would create a categories sitemap xml file, link to that in your robots.txt, and let that do the work of prioritizing the categories for crawling/discovery and indexation.
-
@aspenfasteners to answer your question: "do we KNOW that Google will immediately de-index URL's blocked by robots.txt?"
Google will not immediately de-index URLs that are blocked by robots.txt, based on my experience. I've dealt with very similar situation but with much greater scale - around 8M automatically generated pages that got into Google index. It may take a year or more to de-index these pages completely. Of course, every case is different, but based on my understanding, if you block these low-quality product pages, Google will slowly start re-evaluating these pages, and it will start with the ones that get some traffic.
Here is what happens when Google re-evaluates your individual product pages:
When deciding, whether to keep a page in its index or not, Google takes into account multiple factors, and one of the most important ones is how many backlinks (both internal and external) are leading to a page. Other factors - content quality, if the page is similar or duplicate to another page, Core Web Vitals score, amount of your crawl budget, and, of course, external backlinks (which is irrelevant for your case).
If you are afraid of loosing some traffic that comes to these product pages, or you have other concerns, just do a smaller experiment: take a sample of 1000-2000 pages, block them in robots.txt or by adding meta robots "noindex, follow" directive, and observe Google's reaction in 1-6 weeks, depending on your crawl budget.
Another thing to check:
If you use Screaming Frog, it has a nice feature to show internal pagerank and the number of internal incoming links that lead to every page. As a rule of thumb, if an individual product page has at least 10 internal incoming links from canonicalized pages, there is a high probability it will get indexed.
-
@terentyev - sorry, can't edit my questions once submitted and I wait for approval (why?) the statement should read my question SHOULD be very specific, whereas my original question was much more general - you answered that question very nicely. Sorry for any misunderstanding
-
@terentyev thanks for the reply. We have no reason to believe these URL's are backlinked. These aren't consumer products that individual are interested in, our site is a wholesale B2B selling very narrow categories in bulk quantities typically for manufacturing. Therefore, almost zero chance for backlinks anywhere for something as specific as a particular size/material/package quantity of a product.
We have already initiated a canonicalization project started but we are stuck between two concerns from sales, 1) we can't wait for canonicalization (which is complex) we need sales now and 2) don't touch robots.txt because MAYBE the individual products are indexed.
So that is why my question is very specific - do we KNOW that Google will immediately de-index URL's blocked by robots.txt?
-
@aspenfasteners thanks for interesting question.
to summarize my understanding:- you have ~300K individual product pages, many of them are duplicates; eg. a single product can have multiple characteristics (eg. size or quantity) but the pages are essentially the same.
- your goal is to index 200 product categories that contain a collection of these products, and remove the low-quality duplicate individual pages from Google index in the long run.
- my assumption is that these 300K product pages have been historically accumulating some backlinks, which is one of the reasons why they are indexed.
If I am right about the 1 and 2, then you should not block these individual product pages, but rather add canonical URLs to them, which should point to the respective category page that you want to get indexed.
Once you have these canonicals implemented, you should wait for a few months or more for Google to pass the link equity to your 200 product category pages, and once it is done, you are free to block them from indexing on robots.txt + meta tag on the page itself, and maybe even x-robots-tag. The way how to block them - it is a different discussion. Let me know if you want to learn more on the best approach.
So, here is my checklist for this URL migration:
- add canonicals pointing from product pages to category pages.
- make sure that all category pages are well interlinked between each other, and the individual product pages are linked to several category pages (eg. a product A should be linked to category A, and also to similar categories B & C). As a rule of thumb, make sure that each category page has at least 10 incoming links from other category pages.
- Make sure that all these category pages are linked from your homepage
- Make sure that sitemap contains only self-canonicalized pages.
- Make sure that these category pages have good core web vitals metrics, compared to your competitors on SERP.
- In 2-3 months, when you see that Google indexes the category pages, and crawling of product pages have been reduced significantly, and the ranks of the category pages have gone up, it is ok to block these 300K pages from crawling.
As to manually submitting the categories by hand, I doubt it will help, especially if the product pages have a lot of backlinks. I've seen many cases when Google disregards the robots.txt directives if a page has good backlinks and traffic.
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
-
Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)
Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG0 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt
Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links. While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google. For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do? Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed. Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY1