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 Disallow Backslash - Is it right command
-
Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character
ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product
www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product
Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk
Need to know for command :-
User-agent: * Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,
-
Thanks, you seem lucky to me.. Almost after 2 month i have got the code for making all these encoded url's redirect correctly. Finally, now if one types
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
then he's redirected through 301 to the correct url
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
-
Hello Gagan,
I think the best way to handle this would be using the rel canonical tag or rewriting the URLs to get rid of the parameters and replace them with something more user-friendly.
The rel canonical tag would be the easiest way out of those two. I notice the version without the encoding (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 ) have a rel canonical tag that correctly references itself as the canonical version. However, the encoded URLs (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10) which is actually http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 does NOT have a rel canonical tag.
If the version with the backslash had a rel canonical tag stating that the following URL is canonical it would solve your issue, I think.
Canonical URL:
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 -
Sure, If i show you some url they are crawled as :-
Sample Incorrect URLs crawled and reported as duplicate one in Google Webmaster & Moz too
|
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
| http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=category&Itemid=2 |
|
Correct URL
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2
What we found online
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. URLs cannot contain spaces.
%22 reflects - " and %5c as \ (forward slash)
We intend to remove these duplicate one created having %22 and %5c within them..
Many thanks
-
I am not entirely sure I understood your question as intended, but I will do my best to answer.
I would not put this in my robots.txt flie because it could possibly be misunderstood as a forward slash, in which case your entire domain would be blocked:
Disallow: \
We can possibly provide you with some alternative suggestions on how to keep Google from crawling those pages if you could share some real examples.
It may be best to rewrite/redirect those URls instead since they don't seem to be the canonical version you intend to be presented to the user.
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
-
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 -
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Large robots.txt file
We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Baidu Spider appearing on robots.txt
Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it. This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below) User-agent: Baiduspider
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: / I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website? Thanks for your help,
-Reed0 -
Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?
Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4