We got notice from Google's Search Console that one of our blog posts couldn't be crawled. When inspecting the URL from the Google Search Console it reports that the paged was blocked by the following in our robots.txt file.
Disallow: /*?s=
I also ask why "Disallow: /*?s=" would be used? Why worry about parses that contain the letter "s"? If we remove it, what's the risk? Thanks so much in advance for any additional insight that can be shared - P
This query is commonly used on WordPress-based sites.
There may be several types of content on your site and the site builder wanted to allow search only for certain types of content by another way of searching.
It makes sense for example on a store site that wants to restrict users from searching for the products using a customized search form so that they do not wander behind the scenes of the site.
Google's robot has a number of ways to identify if it's a WordPress based site, which is probably why it's looking for that end of the path.
Related
I've seen news sites (CNN, Fox News, etc.) use HTML files as their post content. For my blog, I currently use dynamic pages (e.g. www.example.com/post/?id=3).
I'm wondering if this is the correct way to go, mostly because AdSense won't accept /post/ for ads. Is this because it's just pulling up /post/ & not the id?
So basically, which way do you recommend? Thanks
It depends on the contend of your page. But basically the good way is to create easy to read links like:
http://example.com/drive-to-norway
It's because it's easy to read for people and before clicking the user knowns what it could be (instead for example: http://example.com/id=3)
Some bigger pages do not use that convention because they for example sell a lot of similar items and having named, unique links without any numbering isn't possible/easy for them. Like I wrote at the beginning - it depends on content.
full disclaimer, I am not a programer, I am an SEO trying to learn how to not rely on my developer for every little question I have.
Currently my issue is this. I use Screaming Frog to crawl my sites to layout the page titles, meta descriptions, h1, h2, etc so I can more easily plan out my changes.
The other day I wanted to run a report for my client and my own company website and got the following back.
So I know robots.txt is a way to make pages on your site but not have google crawl them. What I don't know is why an entire site would have this message as opposed to just some pages.
Can anyone give advice on how to fix this or links to how to's? I get this issue a lot and would like to educate myself so I don't have to wait for someone else. I get these as well when I try indexing websites on Google Search Console.
Many Thanks
What I don't know is why an entire site would have this message as
apposed to just some pages.
The robots.txt for your website has not been written properly if the intention is to index its content.
Or Screaming Frog might have a but if indeed the robots.txt file is written properly.
Or some webmaster decided the content was not worth indexing on Google or that bots would eat too much bandwidth (as in not being selective to restrict access).
Checking the current robots.txt file on that website, I see this content:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Which means the any page of that website is allowed to be crawled by any crawler (here the explanation of that file's syntax: https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt)
So the current file should not cause that error OP mentions. Seeing that this question is from June 30/2017 and the robots.txt file was last modified on Jul 11/2017, it seems since this question was opened the OP may have already fixed whatever problem they had.
I'm working with an e-commerce system at the moment that is throwing up hundreds of potential duplicate page urls and trying to work out how to hide them via robots.txt untill the developers are able to sort there ...... out.
I have managed to block most of them but got stuck on the last type so the question is:
I have 4 urls to the same product page with the below structure, how do I block the first one but not the others.
www.example.com/ProductPage
www.example.com/category/ProductPage
www.example.com/category/subcategory/ProductPage
www.example.com/category/subcategory/ProductPage/assessorypage
So far the only idea I can come up with is using:
Disallow: /*?id=*/
this however blocks everything…
EDIT: I believe I may have found a way to do it by setting up a robots.txt file to disallow all then just allow the specific paths I want again below that and then…once again disallow any specific paths after that.
Anyone know if this has a negative effect on SEO using disallow > allow > disallow.
You could set the meta tag for the rel="canonical" property. This will help search engines know which url is the 'right' one and not have more than one URL per product in search results.
Read here for more information
hi sirs what's the best way to prevent google from showing of a folder in the search engine ?, like e.g www.example.com/support , what should i do if I want the support folder to disappear in google ?
the first thing I did was place a 'robots.txt' file and include this code
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support/etc
but the results is a total disaster, am not able to use the support page anymore unless i remove the robots.txt
what's the best thing to do ?
robots.txt shouldnt affect the way your page function. If in doubt, you can use tools to generate like http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php or http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/
When dissallowing in robots file, you can explicitly specify a file or subfolder rather than just a folder.
You can also use meta tag in your document to tell the crawler not to use it
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
what's the best way to prevent google from showing of a folder in the search engine ?
A robots.txt file is the right way to do this. Your example is correct for blocking the /support/etc directory and its descendants.
am not able to use the support page anymore unless i remove the robots.txt
It doesn't make sense that a robots.txt file would affect the way your site functions, and certainly it should never affect which pages can be accessed by a human. I suspect something else is awry -- check your server logs to see what kinds of errors are being recorded.
While not the preferred method of limiting robot access, Google talks about using a noindex meta tag here. This will also prevent the various pages from showing up if they are linked to by a site other than your own.
A good discussion of limiting bots that visit your site can be found here.
i am creating a revised website for a firm that has an existing website. Many of the pages are the same topic and text with a new design. Should i use the same file paths as the prior site to avoid any drop in google or other search engine rankings
Here are some guidelines for a good start: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
Changing Urls is the last thing you want to do. Only consider it if there are no alternatives.
When ranking pages, search engines also consider incoming links, what sites they come from and what text they have in them. By changing your urls you effectively make all those outside links broken.
If you think that the website would benefit from changing file path (e.g., /about-us is always better than ?page_id=2), you should do the change and have an http 301 moved permanently redirect from old url to new url. Google will quickly update its index if you do it this way.