Is it better to use meta tags* or the robots.txt file for informing spiders/crawlers to include or exclude a page?
Are there any issues in using both the meta tags and the robots.txt?
*Eg: <#META name="robots" content="index, follow">
There is one significant difference. According to Google they will still index a page behind a robots.txt DENY, if the page is linked to via another site.
However, they will not if they see a metatag:
While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by robots.txt, we might still find and index a disallowed URL from other places on the web. As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site can still appear in Google search results. You can stop your URL from appearing in Google Search results completely by using other URL blocking methods, such as password-protecting the files on your server or using the noindex meta tag or response header.
Both are supported by all crawlers which respect webmasters wishes. Not all do, but against them neither technique is sufficient.
You can use robots.txt rules for general things, like disallow whole sections of your site. If you say Disallow: /family then all links starting with /family are not indexed by a crawler.
Meta tag can be used to disallow a single page. Pages disallowed by meta tags do not affect sub pages in the page hierarchy. If you have meta disallow tag on /work, it does not prevent a crawler from accessing /work/my-publications if there is a link to it on an allowed page.
Robots.txt IMHO.
The Meta tag option tells bots not to index individual files, whereas Robots.txt can be used to restrict access to entire directories.
Sure, use a Meta tag if you have the odd page in indexed folders that you want skipping, but generally, I'd recommend you most of your non-indexed content in one or more folders and use robots.txt to skip the lot.
No, there isn't a problem in using both - if there is a clash, in general terms, a deny will overrule an allow.
meta is superior.
In order to exclude individual pages from search engine indices, the noindex meta tag is actually superior to robots.txt.
There is a very huge difference between meta robot and robots.txt.
In robots.txt, we ask crawlers which page you have to crawl and which one you have to exclude but we don't ask crawler to not to index those excluded pages from crawling.
But if we use meta robots tag, we can ask search engine crawlers not to index this page.The tag to be used for this is:
<#meta name = "robot name", content = "noindex"> (remove #)
OR
<#meta name = "robot name", content = "follow, noindex"> (remove #)
In the second meta tag, I have asked robot to follow that URL but not to index in search engine.
Here is my knowledge about them. I am talking about their work area. Both we can use for blocking content.
The difference between both is:
Meta Robot can block a single page with some piece of the code paste in the header of the website. By using the meta robot tag we tell the search engine for which function we are using meta tag.
In Robots.txt file you can block the whole website.
Here is the example of meta robot:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="robots" CONTENT="all">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Here is the example of Robots.txt file:
Allowing crawlers to crawl all website
user-agent: *
Allow:
Disallow:
Disallowing crawlers to crawl all website
user-agent: *
Allow:
Disallow:/
I would probably use robots.txt over the meta tag. Robots.txt has been around longer, and might be more widely supported (But I am not 100% sure on that).
As for the second part, I think most spiders will take whatever is the most restrictive setting for a page - if there is a disparity between the robots.txt and meta tag.
Robots.txt is good for pages which consume a lot of your crawling budget like internal search or filters with infinite combination. If you allow Google to index yoursite.com/search=lalalala it will waste you crawling budget.
You want to use 'noindex,follow' in a robots meta tag, rather than robots.txt, because it will allow the link juice to pass through. It is better from a SEO perspective.
Is it better to use meta tags* or the robots.txt file for informing spiders/crawlers to include or exclude a page?
Answer: Both are important to use, they are used for different purposes. Robots file is used to include or exclude pages or root files from spider's index. While, Meta tags are used analyse a website page that defines about it's niche & content within the page.
Are there any issues in using both the meta tags and the robots.txt?
Answer: Both should be implemented to sites so that search engine spiders/crawlers can index or de-index the site urls.
Read more here about working of a search engine spiders >>https://www.playbuzz.com/alexhuber10/how-search-and-spider-engines-work
You can have any one but if your website has plenty of web pages then robots.txt is easy and reduces time complexity
Related
On my website I have a page for the cart, that is: http://www.example.com/cart and another for the cartoons: http://www.example.com/cartoons. How should I write on my robots.txt file to ignore only the cart page?
The cart page does not accept an ending slash on the URL, so if I do:
Disallow: /cart, it will ignore /cartoon too.
I don't know if it's possible and it will be correctly parsed by the spider bots something like /cart$. I dont want to force Allow: /cartoon because may be another pages with the same prefix.
In the original robots.txt specification, this is not possible. It neither supports Allow nor any characters with special meaning inside a Disallow value.
But some consumers support additional things. For example, Google gives a special meaning to the $ sign, where it represents the end of the URL path:
Disallow: /cart$
For Google, this will block /cart, but not /cartoon.
Consumers that don’t give this special meaning will interpret $ literally, so they will block /cart$, but not /cart or /cartoon.
So if using this, you should specify the bots in User-agent.
Alternative
Maybe you are fine with crawling but just want to prevent indexing? In that case you could use meta-robots (with a noindex value) instead of robots.txt. Supporting bots will still crawl the /cart page (and follow links, unless you also use nofollow), but they won’t index it.
<!-- in the <head> of the /cart page -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
You could explicitly allow and disallow both paths. More specific paths will take a higher precedent if they are longer in length:
disallow: /cart
allow: /cartoon
More info is available at: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt
Scenario:
I own a website with original content. But to support some categories I use creative commons licensed contents, which is, of course, duplicate content.
Question:
If I want to avoid penalization for duplicate content, are this statements true?
I should mention the original author to be a fair human being.
I must use meta noindex to avoid robots from fetching the content.
I must use cannonical url to metion the original content and it's author.
I don't need to use nofollow meta along with noindex, because it has other purposes.
I don't have to use rel="nofollow" on incoming links inside my site that point to the duplicate content, because it won't be indexed anyways, given the noindex meta tag.
I did my research and that is what I got from it. But I am not sure about this, and I would like to understand it before applying anything at all.
Thank you.
In order to avoid the penalization for duplicate content, you can of course use meta noindex and rel="nofollow". Here is the syntax:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
This tells robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow.
There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:
Robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
The NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It's entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.
Don't confuse this NOFOLLOW with the rel="nofollow" link attribute.
I have a robots.txt file set up as such
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*
For a site that is all unique URL based. Sort of like https://jsfiddle.net/ when you save a new fiddle it gives it a unique URL. I want all of my unique URLs to be invisible to Google. No indexing.
Google has indexed all of my unique URLs, even though it says "A description for this result is not available because of the site's robots.txt file. - learn more"
But that still sucks because all the URLs are there, and clickable - so all the data inside is available. What can I do to 1) get rid of these off Google and 2) stop Google from indexing these URLs.
Robots.txt tells search engines not to crawl the page, but it does not stop them from indexing the page, especially if there are links to the page from other sites. If your main goal is to guarantee that these pages never wind up in search results, you should use robots meta tags instead. A robots meta tag with 'noindex' means "Do not index this page at all". Blocking the page in robots.txt means "Do not request this page from the server."
After you have added the robots meta tags, you will need to change your robots.txt file to no longer disallow the pages. Otherwise, the robots.txt file would prevent the crawler from loading the pages, which would prevent it from seeing the meta tags. In your case, you can just change the robots.txt file to:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
(or just remove the robots.txt file entirely)
If robots meta tags are not an option for some reason, you can also use the X-Robots-Tag header to accomplish the same thing.
I have a wordpress website which has been indexed in search engines.
I have edited Robots.txt to disallow certain directories and webpages from search index.
I only know how to use allow and disallow, but don't know how to use the follow and nofollow in Robots.txt file.
I read somewhere while Googling on this that I can have webpages that won't be indexed in Google but will be crawled for pageranks. This can be achieved by disallowing the webpages in Robots.txt and use follow for the webpages.
Please let me know how to use follow and nofollow in Robots.txt file.
Thanks
Sumit
a.) The follow/no follow and index/no index rules are not for robots.txt (sets general site rules) but for an on-page meta-robots tag (sets the rules for this specific page)
More info about Meta-Robots
b.) Google won't crawl the Disallowed pages but it can index them on SERP (using info from inbound links or website directories like Dmoz).
Having said that, there is no PR value you can gain from this.
More info about Googlebot's indexing behavior
Google actually does recognize the Noindex: directive inside robots.txt. Here's Matt Cutts talking about it: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-noindex-behavior/
If you put "Disallow" in robots.txt for a page already in Google's index, you will usually find that the page stays in the index, like a ghost, stripped of its keywords. I suppose this is because they know they won't be crawling it, and they don't want the index containing bit-rot. So they replace the page description with "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."
So, the problem remains: How do we remove that link from Google since "Disallow" didn't work? Typically, you'd want to use meta robots noindex on the page in question because Google will actually remove the page from the index if it sees this update, but with that Disallow directive in your robots file, they'll never know about it.
So you could remove that page's Disallow rule from robots.txt and add a meta robots noindex tag to the page's header, but now you've got to wait for Google to go back and look at a page you told them to forget about.
You could create a new link to it from your homepage in hopes that Google will get the hint, or you could avoid the whole thing by just adding that Noindex rule directly to the robots.txt file. In the post above, Matt says that this will result in the removal of the link.
No you cant.
You can set which directories you want to block and which bots but you cant set nofollow by robots.txt
Use robots meta tag on the pages to set nofollow.
Suppose I have a link in the page My Messages, which on click will display an alert message "You must login to access my messages".
May be it's better to just not display this link when user is not logged in, but I want "My Messages" to be visible even if user is not logged in.
I think this link is user-friendly, but for search engines they will get redirected to login page, which I think is.. bad for SEO? or is it fine?
I thought of keeping My Messages displayed as normal text (not as a link), then wrap it with a link tag by using javascript/jquery, is this solution good or bad? other ideas please? Thank you.
Try to create a robots.txt file and write:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mymessages
This will keep SEO bots out of that folder
Use a robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages they should not index.
Using nofollow to block access to a page is erroneous - this is not what nofollow is for. This attribute was designed to allow to you place a link in page without conferring any weight or endorsement of the link. In other words, it's not a link that search engines should regard as significant for page-ranking algorithms. It does not mean "do not index this page" - just "don't follow this particular link to that page"
Here's what Google have to say about nofollow
...However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other
sites link to them without using nofollow or if the URLs are submitted
to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search
engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
One way of keeping the URL from affecting your rank is setting the rel attribute of your link:
My Messages
Another option is robots.txt, that way you can disallow the bots from the URL entirely.
You might want to use robots.txt to exclude /mymessages. This will also prevent engines which have already visited /mymessages from visiting it again.
Alternatively, add the following to the top of the /mymessages script:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
If you want to tell search engines, not to follow a particular link , then use rel="nofollow".
It is a way to tell search engines and bots that don't follow this link.
Now,google will not crawl that link and does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across this link.