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 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/
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your reply!
Unfortunately the problem is yet to be fixed, I hope that my disallow will work shortly.
It seems that most of the index.php links to each other internally (and from old /index.php/ pages that no longer exist), which is super weird. How google found them does not make any sense to me.
I don't beleive that external sources are linking to these pages either - I mean, how would they find these links anyway?.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Like Chris, I spidered your site and couldn't find any links to /index.php files, which probably indicates one of two things:
- You've fixed the problem - Yay!
- Or Google is finding those links from external sources
- Google found those links at one time in the past, and is still trying to crawl them.
In the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, if you click on the link of each 404, there's often a "linked from" source where you can see where Google discovered the broken link. This is really helpful in rooting out the cause.
Regardless, I'm going to go with #1 and optimistically believe that you were able to fix the problem.
-
If I spider your site I'm not seeing any /index.php urls. Does that mean you did get Joomla to cooperate with your rewriting?
Or was your problem that you'd previously had urls indexed with /index.php/ paths and you needed to remove them?
-
Hi Mikkel, I have checked your robots.txt, it looks perfect. If you redirect /index.php to home page that using httaccess file or by using any joomla plugin that would great for you. And its also a permanent solution.
-
Well, I tried the sensible solution and redirecting to the correct URL instead. However the SEF program is quite limited and keep on creating new URLs regardless of my modification. Im looking for a more permanent solution, and the disallow seems at bit simple as I'm not a super programmer.
By the way - thanks for quick replys, kudos to both of you!
-
Sure, the website in question is www.vauni.dk
I don't think that there is any inbound links to the index.php pages. They are not easily found.
-
Couldn't you rewrite those /index.php/ urls to remove the /index.php/?
Like this in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Only used Joomla once, but there must be a way to configure joomla to just use "/" instead of "/index.php/"?
Update:
Here's a solution to your /index.php/ issue:
http://www.eprcreations.com/remove-index-php-from-joomla-urls/
Once you've updated that, and have your urls working properly without the /index.php/, you could add this slight modification of the rewrite rule above so that all your old /index.php/ urls would be 301'd to your new ones:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R=301,L]
Put it underneath the RewriteBase / line they describe in that post.
-
Hi Mikkel,
Do you inbound link pointing to you index.php pages ? If yes, then it might affect your seo. Disallow: /index.ph/ is perfect but after implementing it don't inter link those index.php pages. Can you share me your website URL so that I can show you with example. How to do it.
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
-
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
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 -
Are robots.txt wildcards still valid? If so, what is the proper syntax for setting this up?
I've got several URL's that I need to disallow in my robots.txt file. For example, I've got several documents that I don't want indexed and filters that are getting flagged as duplicate content. Rather than typing in thousands of URL's I was hoping that wildcards were still valid.
Technical SEO | | mkhGT0 -
Is there any value in having a blank robots.txt file?
I've read an audit where the writer recommended creating and uploading a blank robots.txt file, there was no current file in place. Is there any merit in having a blank robots.txt file? What is the minimum you would include in a basic robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Index.php and 301 redirect with Joomla
Hi, I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails. I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/ If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code #index.php to root
Technical SEO | | NaescentAdam
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L] And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages. Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this? Thanks, Adam0 -
Instant Indexing
I've been working on a site for a while now, methodically building content and building trust and authority. Lately I've noticed that anything I publish there appears to be instantly indexed by Google, which surprises me. I haven't had this happen before so I'm curious. I'd be interested to hear the experience of others.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
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
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88 Thanks!0 -
Invisible robots.txt?
So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp0