Robot.txt pattern matching
-
Hola fellow SEO peoples!
Site: http://www.sierratradingpost.com
robot: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/robots.txt
Please see the following line: Disallow: /keycodebypid~*
We are trying to block URLs like this:
http://www.sierratradingpost.com/keycodebypid~8855/for-the-home~d~3/kitchen~d~24/
but we still find them in the Google index.
1. we are not sure if we need to specify the robot to use pattern matching.
2. we are not sure if the format is correct. Should we use Disallow: /keycodebypid*/ or /*keycodebypid/ or even /*keycodebypid~/?
What is even more confusing is that the meta robot command line says "noindex" - yet they still show up. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />
Thank you!
-
ok, so not sure sure this was shared. Matt Cutts talking on this same subject.
| | <cite class="kvm">www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2giR-WKUfY</cite> |
-
John, The article was a real eye-opener!Thanks again!
-
Somehow Google is finding these pages, but you're disallowing the Googlebot from reading the page, so it doesn't know anything about the meta noindex tag on the page. If you have meta noindex tags on all of these pages, you can remove that line in your robots.txt preventing bots from reading these pages, and as Google crawls these pages, they should remove them from their SERPs.
-
Great point! I will remember that. However I have both the disallow line in the robots.txt file and I also have the noindex meta command. Yet Google shows 3000 of them!?!?!?!
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.sierratradingpost.com+keycodebypid
-
Well done John!!!
-
Hi,
then you have the robots.txt and the meta tag. I think its better the metatag (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt)
Have you WebMaster Tools in your web? you can test your robots.txt file (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449)
-
Here's a good SEOMoz post about this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts. What's most likely happening is that the disallow in robots.txt is preventing the bots from indexing the page, so they're not going to find the meta noindex tag. If people link to one of these pages externally, the disallow in robots.txt does not prevent the page from appearing in search results.
The robots.txt syntax you're using now looks correct to me for what you're trying to do.
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
-
Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site. I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true? The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?
Technical SEO | | Closetstogo0 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Best way to create robots.txt for my website
How I can create robots.txt file for my website guitarcontrol.com ? It is having login and Guitar lessons.
Technical SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Disallow: /search/ in robots but soft 404s are still showing in GWT and Google search?
Hi guys, I've already added the following syntax in robots.txt to prevent search engines in crawling dynamic pages produce by my website's search feature: Disallow: /search/. But soft 404s are still showing in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I need to wait(it's been almost a week since I've added the following syntax in my robots.txt)? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | esiow20130 -
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin. Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this? Here's original message Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure. If the site error rate is less than 100%: Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Un-Indexing a Page without robots.txt or access to HEAD
I am in a situation where a page was pushed live (Went live for an hour and then taken down) before it was supposed to go live. Now normally I would utilize the robots.txt or but I do not have access to either and putting a request in will not suffice as it is against protocol with the CMS. So basically I am left to just utilizing the and I cannot seem to find a nice way to play with the SE to get this un-indexed. I know for this instance I could go to GWT and do it but for clients that do not have GWT and for all the other SE's how could I do this? Here is the big question here: What if I have a promotional page that I don't want indexed and am met with these same limitations? Is there anything to do here?
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Quick robots.txt check
We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neooptic0