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.
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.
-
That's why I mentioned: "eventually". But thanks for the added information. Hopefully it's clear now for the original poster.
-
Looking at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0&feature=youtu.be Matt Cutts advises to use the noindex tag on every individual page. However, this is very time consuming if you're dealing wit a large volume of pages.
The other option he recommends is to use the robots.txt file as well as the URL removal tool in GWMT, Although this is the second choice option, it does seem easier for us to implement than the noindex tag.
-
Hi,
Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.
-
Hi Nico
Great response thanks.
This is certainly something I'm taking into consideration and will question my developer about this.
-
Thanks Thomas.
I'm now finding out from my developer is we are able to noindex these pages with the meta robots.
If this is something that isn't possible, it's likely that we'll add to the robots.txt as you did.
Either way I think will be progress to different degrees.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
Completely agree, I have done the same for a website I am doing work with, ideally we would noindex with meta robots however that isn't possible. So instead we added to the robots.txt, the number of indexed pages have dropped, yet when you search exactly it just says the description can't be reached.
So I was happy with the results as they're now not ranking for the terms they were.
-
I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though
In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.
The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...
At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.
So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)
Regards
Nico
-
Thanks Martijn. This is what I was assuming would happen. However, I got a confusing message from my developer which said the following,
"won't remove the URL's from the index but it will mean that they will only show up for very specific searches that customers are extremely unlikely to use. It will also increase Asgard's crawl budget as Google and Bing won't try to crawl these URLs. Would you be happy with this solution?"
I would tend to still agree with your statement though.
-
Yes they will be eventually. As you disallow Google to crawl the URLs it will probably start hiding the descriptions for some of these image pages soon as they can't crawl them anymore. Then at some point they'll stop looking at them at all.
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
-
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0