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.
Robots.txt is blocking Wordpress Pages from Googlebot?
-
I have a robots.txt file on my server, which I did not develop, it was done by the web designer at the company before me. Then there is a word press plugin that generates a robots.txt file. How Do I unblock all the wordpress pages from googlebot?
-
Delete everything under the following directives and you should be good.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/trackback
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/comments
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /page/
As a rule of thumb, it's not a good idea to use wild cards in your robots.txt file - you may be excluding an entire folder inadvertently.
-
Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched.
http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743
http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240
These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes.
Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/trackback
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /*/comments
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /page/
User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed
-
I'm not sure to what extent your website is being blocked with the robots.txt file but it's pretty easy to diagnose. You'll first need to identify and confirm that googlebot is being blocked by typing in your web browser ~> www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt
If you see an entry such as "User-agent: *" or "User-agent: googlebot" being used in conjunction with "Disallow" then you know your website is being blocked with the robots.txt file. Given your situation you'll need to go through a two step process.
First, go into your wordpress plugin page and deactivate the plugin which generates your robots.txt file. Second, login to the root folder of your server and look for the robots.txt file. Lastly, change "Disallow" to "Allow" and that should work but you'll need to confirm by typing in the robots URL again.
Given the limited information in your question I hope that helps. If you run into any more issues don't hesitate to post them here.
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
-
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
Stuck on Page 2 - What Would You Do?!?
My site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e My main keyword is : Plastic Bins i have been going back and forth between page 1 and 2 for this keyword and i was wondering if any of you could provide any guidance as to why i can't get on the top of page 1, and stay there... My site has been around for a while, we believe we have a great user experience, all unique, fresh content, and the lowest prices... I must be missing out on something major if I cannot get a steady page 1 ranking... Any thoughts? Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt
Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links. While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google. For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do? Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed. Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY1
