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.
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
-
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls.
So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*?
To prevent the price faceted url from being cached:
/category.html?price=1%2C1000
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88Thanks!
-
If you can no-index , follow all but the default, then you will send link juice to the pages but it will return the link juice because it is follow, but they will not index because they are no-index.
If you use robots, then it can not read the page to follow the links.
-
Hey Tyler! haven't seen you on SEOmoz in a while. Hope you are good!
Check to see if this would make sense for you. GWT > Site Configuration > URL Perameters. It says "Only use this feature if you feel confident about how parameters work for your site. Telling Googlebot to exclude URLs with certain parameters could result in large numbers of your pages disappearing from our index."
-
If I can, then I disallow hundreds of pages that are duplicate content and should not be crawled.
If I don't then I send link juice to urls that I don't want seen.
This is a good answer though, thanks. Any other thoughts?
-
You can, but then you have links passing link juice to non followed pages. it would be better if you used canonical. even better would be to add no-index, follow meta tag when non canonical page is displayed, but this requres some codeing.
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
-
Role of Robots.txt and Search Console parameters settings
Hi, wondering if anyone can point me to resources or explain the difference between these two. If a site has url parameters disallowed in Robots.txt is it redundant to edit settings in Search Console parameters to anything other than "Let Googlebot Decide"?
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Multiple robots.txt files on server
Hi! I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step. One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names: robots.txt (original dupplicate)
Technical SEO | | mjukhud
robots.txt-Original (original)
robots.txt-NEW (other content)
robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate) Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!0 -
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 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0