How can I block unwanted urls being indexed on google?
-
Hi,
I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites.
thanks in advance.
-
Hi Nick,
Thanks so much!
Is there any advantage for shorter URLs over long ones? My site is on IIS6, How can I remove the .aspx extension in IIS6?
-
Since some of the unwanted URLs are linked from other sites, use 301 redirects.
Usually, people want to remove the file extensions like .aspx for cleaner looking, shorter URLs.
You can remove the .aspx extension from all pages with a rewrite like this in .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.aspx -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.aspxIf you want to keep the URLs with .aspx, rather than without, I think you will have to use individual 301 redirects.
-
Vipin
My understanding is that if you block anything from Robots.txt that you prevent link juice from flowing for the pages. If the pages in question have links to them then I agree with Highland to 301 redirect them to the correct pages.
shivun
-
301 is definitely the way to go, especially if you have inbound links to the unwanted pages. That will preserve most of your rank and transfer it to the actual page.
As far as blocking goes, you can use a robots.txt or a robots meta tag on your page with a NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX
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 to do if lots of backend pages have been indexed by Google erroneously?
Hi Guys Our developer forgot to add a no index no follow tag on the pages he created in the back-end. So we have now ended up with lots of back end pages being indexed in google. So my question is, since many of those are now indexed in Google, so is it enough to just place a no index no follow on those or should we do a 301 redirect on all those to the most appropriate page? If a no index no follow is enough, that would create lots of 404 errors so could those affect the site negatively? Cheers Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martin19700 -
What to try when Google excludes your URL only from high-traffic search terms and results?
We have a high authority blog post (high PA) that used to rank for several high-traffic terms. Right now the post continues to rank high for variations of the high-traffic terms (e.g keyword + " free", keyword + " discussion") but the URL has been completed excluded from the money terms with alternative URLs of the domain ranking on positions 50+. There is no manual penalty in place or a DCMA exclusion. What are some of the things ppl would try here? Some of the things I can think of: - Remove keyword terms in article - Change the URL and do a 301 redirect - Duplicate the POST under new URL, 302 redirect from old blog post, and repoint links as much as you have control - Refresh content including timestamps - Remove potentially bad neighborhood links etc Has anyone seen the behavior above for their articles? Are there any recommendations? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ppseo800 -
Why did Google cache & index a different domain than my own?
We own www.homemenorca.com, a real estate website based in Spain. Pages from this domain are not being indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&oq=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59l2.3504j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8Please notice that the URLs are Home Menorca, but the titles are not Home Menorca, they are Fincas Mantolan, a completely different domain and company: http://www.fincasmantolan.com/. Furthermore, when we look at Google's cache of Home Menorca, we see a different website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&oq=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59.1311j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8We reviewed Google Search Console, Google Fetch, the canonical tags, the XML sitemap, and many more items. Google Search Console accepted our XML sitemap, but is only indexing 5-10% of the pages. Google is fetching and rendering the pages properly. However, we are not seeing the correct content being indexed in Google. We have seen issues with page loading times, loading content longer than 4 seconds, but are unsure why Google would be indexing a different domain.If you have suggestions or thoughts, we would very much appreciate it.Additional Language Issue:When a user searches "Home Menorca" from America or the UK with "English" selected in their browser as their default language, they are given a Spanish result. It seems to have accurate hreflang annotations within the head section on the HTML pages, but it is not working properly. Furthermore, Fincas Mantolan's search result is listed immediately below Home Menorca's Spanish result. We believe that if we fix the issue above, we will also fix the language issue. Please let us know any thoughts or recommendations that can help us. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CassG12340 -
Google Frequently Indexing - Good or Bad?
Hi, My website is only 4 months old and receives about 40 to 50 organic visits every day. It currently has about 100 pages out of which only 3-4 rank in the top 10 for the target KWs. I usually try to publish, at least 1 article a day but sometimes certain articles are more than 2000 words long with a few of infographics and hence takes way more time (maybe even 3 days to publish one) Only over the last week, I am observing that every time i am publishing a page (usually daily) google is indexing them the same day. This I have heard happens for moderately big sites but my site is really small at this stage. Note: For the first 80 pages, I used to "fetch as googlebot" in webmasters as otherwise my site would be crawled once in 2 weeks but over the last 3-4 weeks, i rely on googles scheduled visits. Is this a good or bad sign? I would like to assume its good because of my engagement. Though for only organic visits, my Gogle Analytics bounce rate is 65% in analytics out of the remaining 35%, the avg time on site >7 mins. That means if someone sticks to my site, they consume a lot of my content. Also, since analytics' bounce rate is not same as the search bounce (back button) I would like to consider that the bounce is actually lesser than that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwautism0 -
Index Pages become No-Index
Hi Mozzers, Here is the scenario: I created a landing page targeting Holiday keywords for the holiday season. The page has been crawled and indexed - I see my landing page in the SERP. However, because of the CMS layout, since the Holiday is over and I don't want it to be displayed on the homepage, i have to remove the page from hp which makes it no-index (don't ask why, it's how the CMS was built). Question: How does this affect this LP's search? Since it's already crawled and etc. will it still be on the SERP after i change the page to no-index? If I remove the no-index next year for the holiday season, how does this all play out? Any insights or information provided will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TommyTan0 -
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 -
Google: How to See URLs Blocked by Robots?
Google Webmaster Tools says we have 17K out of 34K URLs that are blocked by our Robots.txt file. How can I see the URLs that are being blocked? Here's our Robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: /swish.cgi Disallow: /demo Disallow: /reviews/review.php/new/ Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/order.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/productsearch.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/billing.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/inv.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/new_options.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/registration.cgi Disallow: /cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/tellfriend.cgi Disallow: /*?gdftrk Sitemap: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/google-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0