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How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
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We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/
How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why.
If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site?
Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content.
For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML
This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff
As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems.
Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result?
For example:
Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/
Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/
Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/
Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed?
Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
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Thanks so much to you all. This has gotten us closer to an answer. We are consulting with the folks who developed the Web store to make sure that these solutions won't break other things if implemented, particularly something mentioned to me by our IT Director called "Sim links" - I'll keep you posted!
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I am referring to Web users. If a user or search engine tried to view those directory listing pages, they will get a Forbidden message, which is what you want to happen. The content in those directories will still be accessible by the pages on the site since the files still exist in those directories, but the pages listing the files in those directories won't be accessible in the browser to users/search engines. In other words, turning off the Directory indexes will not affect any of the content on the site.
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He's got the right idea, you shouldn't be serving these pages (unless you have a specific reason to). The problem is these index pages are returning with a status code of 200 OK, so Google assumes it's fine to index them. These pages should either come back with a 404 or a 403 (forbidden), and users then wouldn't be able to browse your site with these directory pages.
Disallowing in robots.txt may not immediately remove these from search results, you may get that lovely description underneath the results that says, "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt".
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Thanks much to you both for jumping in. (thumbs up!)
Streamline, I understand your suggestion regarding .htaccess, however, as I mentioned, the content in these directories is being used to populate content on our pages. In your response you mentioned that users/search engines wouldn't be able to access them. When you say "users," are you referring to Web visitors, and not site admins?
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There's numerous ways Google could have found those pages and added them to the index, but there's really no way to determine exactly what caused it in the first place. All it takes is for one visit by Google for a page to be crawled and indexed.
If you don't want these pages indexed, then blocking those directories/pages in robots.txt would not be the solution because you would prevent Google from accessing those pages at all going forward. But the problem is that these pages are already in Google's index and by simply using the robots.txt file, you are just telling Google not to visit those pages from now on and thus your pages will remain in the index. A better solution would be to add the no-index, no-cache tags to those pages so the next time Google accesses those pages, they will know to remove those pages from the index.
And now that I've read through your post again, I am now realizing you are talking about file directories rather than normal webpages. What I've wrote above mainly still applies, but I think the quick and easy fix would be to turn off Directory Indexes all together (unless you need them for some reason?). All you have to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file -
Options -Indexes
This will turn off these directory listings so users/search engines can't access them and they should eventually fall out of the Google index.
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You can use robots to disallow google from even crawling those pages, while the meta noindex still allows the crawling but prevents the indexing of those pages.
If you have any sensitive data that you don't want Google to read, then go ahead and use the robots directives you wrote above. However, if you just want them deindexed I'll suggest to go with the meta noindex, as it will allow other pages (linked) to be indexed but leave that particular page out.
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