I'd like to start using specific landing pages in a marketing campaign. A quick search on google shows how to disallow specific pages and/or directories using a robots.txt file. (link)
If I don't want the search engines to index these landing pages should I put a single page entries in the robot.txt file or should I put them in specific directories and disallow the directory?
My concern is that anybody can read a robots.txt file and if the actual page names are visible within the robots.txt file it defeats the purpose.
"It defeats the purpose." How so? The purpose of robots.txt is to prevent crawlers from reading particular files or groups of files. Whether you exclude the individual files or put them all in a directory and exclude that directory is irrelevant as far as the crawler's behavior is concerned.
The benefit to putting them all in directories is that your robots.txt file is smaller and easier to manage. You don't have to add a new entry every time you create a new landing page.
You're right that putting a file name in robots.txt lets anybody who reads the file know that the file is there. That shouldn't be a problem. If you have sensitive information that you don't want others to see then it shouldn't be accessible, regardless of whether it's mentioned in robots.txt. Because if the file is publicly accessible, then a bot is going to find it even if you don't mention it in robots.txt.
robots.txt is just a guideline. The existence of a disallow line in robots.txt doesn't prevent an unfriendly crawler from looking at those pages. It just tells the crawler that you don't want them looking at those pages. But crawlers can ignore robots.txt. They shouldn't, and you can block them if they do, but robots.txt itself is more like a stop sign than a road block.
You should be able to simply use the NOINDEX META tag in the HEAD of your page.
http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
Related
I identified that a certain line in the robots.txt that prestashop automatically generates is blocking our products from Google Shopping.
the line in question is
Disallow: /*n=
The matched URL has some UTM tracking parameters used by Google Analytics. Example URL that matches the line in robots.txt:
domain.com/page.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping
the part that matches is the n= in utm_campaign=
I'm trying to get FTP access and will able to edit the robots.txt manually, but I noticed that in the back-end there's a button to automatically generate it again, so I'm afraid that someone might go in there, re-generate it and then we have to do the same thing over again... Is there a fail safe way to edit what goes into the default robots.txt file?
Try to add this line in your robots.txt
Allow: /*campaign=
I am currently writing my robots.txt file and have some trouble deciding whether I should allow or disallow some folders for SEO purposes.
Here are the folders I have:
/css/ (css)
/js/ (javascript)
/img/ (images i use for the website)
/php/ (PHP which will return a blank page such as for example checkemail.php which checks an email address or register.php which puts data into a SQL database and sends an email)
/error/ (my error 401,403,404,406,500 html pages)
/include/ (header.html and footer.html I include)
I was thinking about disallowing only the PHP pages and let the rest.
What do you think?
Thanks a lot
Laurent
/css and /js -- CSS and Javascript files will probably be crawled by googlebot whether or not you have them in robots.txt. Google uses them to render your pages for site preview. Google has asked nicely that you not put them in robots.txt.
/img -- Googlebot may crawl this even when in robots.txt the same way as CSS and Javascript. Putting your images in robots.txt generally prevents them from being indexed in Google image search. Google image search may be a source of visitors to your site so you may wish to be indexed there.
/php -- sounds like you don't want spiders hitting the urls that perform actions. Good call to use robots.txt
/error -- If your site is set up correctly the spiders will probably never know what directory your error pages are served from. They generally get served at the url that has the error and the spider never sees their actual url. This isn't the case if you redirect to them, which isn't recommended practice anyway. As such, I would say there is no need to put them in robots.txt
How do I tell crawlers / bots not to index any URL that has /node/ pattern?
Following is since day one but I noticed that Google has still indexed a lot of URLs that has
/node/ in it, e.g. www.mywebsite.com/node/123/32
Disallow: /node/
Is there anything that states that do not index any URL that has /node/
Should I write something like following:
Disallow: /node/*
Update:
The real problem is despite:
Disallow: /node/
in robots.txt, Google has indexed pages under this URL e.g. www.mywebsite.com/node/123/32
/node/ is not a physical directory, this is how drupal 6 shows it's content, I guess this is my problem that node is not a directory, merely part of URLs being generated by drupal for the content, how do I handle this? will this work?
Disallow: /*node
Thanks
Disallow: /node/ will disallow any url that starts with /node/ (after the host). The asterisk is not required.
So it will block www.mysite.com/node/bar.html, but will not block www.mysite.com/foo/node/bar.html.
If you want to block anything that contains /node/, you have to write Disallow: */node/
Note also that Googlebot can cache robots.txt for up to 7 days. So if you make a change to your robots.txt today, it might be a week before Googlebot updates its copy of your robots.txt. During that time, it will be using its cached copy.
Disallow: /node/* is exactly what you want to do. Search engines support wildcards in their robots.txt notation and the * characters means "any characters". See Google's notes on robots.txt for more.
update
An alternative way to make sure search engines stay out of a directory, and all directories below it, is to block them with the robots HTTP header. This can be done by placing the following in an htaccess file in your node directory:
Header set x-robots-tag: noindex
Your original Disallow was fine. Jim Mischel's comment seemed spot on and would cause me to wonder if it was just taking time for Googlebot to fetch the updated robots.txt and then unindex relevant pages.
A couple additional thoughts:
Your page URLs may appear in Google search results even if you've included it in robots.txt. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 ("...While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web."). To many people, this is counter-intuitive.
Second, I'd highly recommend verifying ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en), then using tools such as Health->"Fetch as Google" to see real time diagnostics related to retrieving your page. (Does that result indicate that robots.txt is preventing crawling?)
I haven't used it, but Bing has a similar tool: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/fetch-as-bingbot-fe18fa0d . It seems well worthwhile to use diagnostic tools provided by Google, Bing, etc. to perform real-time diagnostics on the site.
This question is a bit old, so I hope you've solved the original problem.
we have a blog in a sub-directory of the main url.
http://www.domain.com/blog/
the blog is run by wordpress and we are using Google Sitemap Generator to create the XML file.
We have an index of all of our sitemaps in the main sitemap.xml which leads to many sitemaps.
From an SEO standpoint would it be best to link directly to the sitemap that is under the blog directory:
e.g. http://www.domian.com/blog/sitemap.xml
or should be do a cron (daily) to copy the file to the main domain's directory:
e.g. http://www.domain.com/sitemap_blog.xml
which will be linked from the main index with the other sitemaps.
What is the best way from an SEO standpoint???
It doesn't matter where the sitemap is. you will want to register its location with the search engines you want to be able to find it. The main thing though is to have a link to your sitemap location in the robots.txt file using the following line:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
Your robots.txt file should be in your domain's root.
A few days ago we replaced our web site with an updated version. The original site's content was migrated to http://backup.example.com. Search engines do not know about the old site, and I do not want them to know.
While we were in the process of updating our site, Google crawled the old version.
Now when using Google to search for our web site, we get results for both the new and old sites (e.g., http://www.example.com and http://backup.example.com).
Here are my questions:
Can I update the backup site content with the new content? Then we can get rid all of old content. My concern is that Google will lower our page ranking due to duplicate content.
If I prevent the old site from being accessed, how long will it take for the information to clear out of Google's search results?
Can I use google disallow to block Google from the old web site.
You should probably put a robots.txt file in your backup site and tell robots not to crawl it at all. Google will obey the restrictions though not all crawlers will. You might want to check out the options available to you at Google's WebMaster Central. Ask Google and see if they will remove the errant links for you from their data.
you can always use robot.txt on backup.* site to disallow google to index it.
More info here: link text
Are the URL formats consistent enough between the backup and current site that you could redirect a given page on the backup site to its equivalent on the current one? If so you could do so, having the backup site send 301 Permanent Redirects to each of the equivalent pages on the site you actually want indexed. The redirecting pages should drop out of the index (after how much time, I do not know).
If not, definitely look into robots.txt as Zepplock mentioned. After setting the robots.txt you can expedite removal from Google's index with their Webmaster Tools
Also you can make a rule in your scripts to redirect with header 301 each page to new one
Robots.txt is a good suggestion but...Google doesn't always listen. Yea, that's right, they don't always listen.
So, disallow all spiders but....also put this in your header
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive" />
It's better to be safe than sorry. Meta commands are like yelling at Google "I DONT WANT YOU TO DO THIS TO THIS PAGE". :)
Do both, save yourself some pain. :)
I suggest you to either add no index meta tag in all old page or just disallow by robots.txt. Best way to just blocked the by robots.txt. One thing more add the sitemap in new site and submit it in webmaster that improve your new website indexing.
Password protect your webpages or directories that you don't want web spiders to crawl/index by putting password protecting code in the .htaccess file (if present in your website's root directory on the server or create a new one and upload it).
The web spiders will never know that password and hence won't be able to index the protected directories or web pages.
you can block any particular urls in webmasters check once...even you can block using robots.txt....remove sitemap for your old backup site and put noindex no follow tag for all of your old backup pages...i too handled this situation for one of my client............