I have a page that is https://www.somedomain.com and then under that page I have the option for users to change the language, like
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=en&random_id=123
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=de&random_id=123
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=fr&random_id=123
etc.
Is it possible to deny Googlebot from crawling these links, but still crawl the https://www.somedomain.com/ main page?
You can use robots.txt to target just the query parameter:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?change_language
This will prevent Google or other good bots from crawling the language options on the homepage. If you want to make it more universal to all pages:
User-agent: *
Disallow: ?change_language
However, you might want to consider letting those language changes to be crawled and instead utilize the rel="alternate" hreflang specification that Google and Bing support.
This way you can indiciate to the engines that the content is in multiple languages allowing your site to get indexed in all the different country specific versions of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Related
I am trying to run web scraping using selenium
What does this robot.txt content mean?
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /launch-announcement/
Can i run web scraping in all folders except go and launch-announcement?
What is a robots.txt file?
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website. The robots.txt file is part of the the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users. The REP also includes directives like meta robots, as well as page-, subdirectory-, or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat links (such as “follow” or “nofollow”).
In practice, robots.txt files indicate whether certain user agents (web-crawling software) can or cannot crawl parts of a website. These crawl instructions are specified by “disallowing” or “allowing” the behavior of certain (or all) user agents. view more...
The Disallow: tells the robot that it should not visit the mentioned page on the site.
Can i run web scraping in all folders except go and launch-announcement?
Yes you can scrape the other page except these 2.
According to the basic robots.txt guide, the rule-
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /launch-announcement/
means crawling /go/ and /launch-announcement/ (and their subdirectories) is disallowed for all user agents.
I am trying to disallow a specific page and its parameters along with a parameter on the entire site. Below I have the exact examples.
We now have a page that will redirect and track exteral urls. Any external URL we want to track will be linked like /redirect?u=http://example.com We do not want to add rel="nofollow" to every link.
Last but not least (our biggest seo and index issue) is every single page has an auto generate URL to disable or enable mobile. So it can be on any page like /?mobileVersion=off (or on) or /accounts?login_to=%2Fdashboard&mobileVersion=off
Basically the easy way to disallow the two parameters would be to disallow mobileVersion and u from any page. (u is the parameter needed to redirect the URL and is only valid on /redirect)
My current robots.txt config:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /redirect
Disallow: / *?*mobileVersion=off
If you want to see our full robots.txt files its located at http://spicethymeinc.com/robots.txt.
you could change
Disallow: / *?*mobileVersion=off
to
Disallow: /*mobileVersion=off
but it looks like it should work.
I'm going off the wildcard section and examples on this page:
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/
edit: I have tested with the googlebot and googlebot mobile. The are blocked by both your current robots.txt and my suggested change. Google webmaster tools has a handy robots checker you can use to test.
Today I experience the problem with search in the google.
When I type "trakopolis" in the google in shows me my page (so it is indexed by google robots), but the description of the page is not available. It is very important to have a description on my website.
the website is:
https://trakopolis.com
the robots txt file is, so I allow everything:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
https://www.google.com.ua/?gws_rd=cr#gs_rn=23&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=O7cIXclKCSxtMd3uDVRVhg&cp=2&gs_id=h&xhr=t&q=trakopolis&es_nrs=true&pf=p&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=tr&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.50165853,d.bGE&fp=d3f611552977418f&biw=1680&bih=949
but as you see the description is not available. I confused :( Sorry if the questio is stupid.
As I see from the google webmaster tools. Google use this robots.txt file, so maybe the issue with redirection from http to https? The website doesn't allow http and we use https. And on main page I use redirection to Login.aspx page in case if user didn't authenticate.
Google shows a description when searching for "trakopolis":
It seems that your robots.txt disallowed crawling of your site some time ago, as some other search engines still display that they are not allowed to show your description, e.g. DuckDuckGo.
Note that your robots.txt uses Allow, which is not part of the original robots.txt specification (but many parsers understand it anyway). It’s equivalent to:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
(But because parsers have to ignore unknown fields, you should have no problem using Allow. An empty or no existent robots.txt always allows crawling of everything.)
Look at the robots.txt of this site:
fr2.dk/robots.txt
The content is:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
That ought to tell google not to index the site, no?
If true, why does the site appear in google searches?
Besides having to wait, because Google's index updates take some time, also note that if you have other sites linking to your site, robots.txt alone won't be sufficient to remove your site.
Quoting Google's support page "Remove a page or site from Google's search results":
If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
One possible alternative solution is also mentioned in above document:
Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).
If you just added this, then you'll have to wait - it's not instantaenous - until Googlebot comes back to respider the site and sees the robots.txt, the site'll still be in their database.
I doubt it's relevant, but you might want to change your "Agent" to "agent" - Google's most likely not case sensitive for this, but can't hurt to follow the standard exactly.
I can confirm Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion File. Here's my file, which I created before putting this origin online:
https://git.habd.as/robots.txt
And the full contents of the file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
User-agent: Google
Disallow: /
And Google still indexed it.
I don't use Google after cancelling my account last March and never had this site added to a webmaster console outside Yandex which leaves me with two assumptions:
Google is scraping Yandex
Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion Standard
I haven't grepped my logs yet but I will and my assumption is I'll find Google spiders in there misbehaving.
in my robots.txt file, I have the following line
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
User-agent:GoogleBot
Disallow: /
Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemapindex.xml
I know that if I put the first 4 lines , googlebot won't index the sites, but what if I put the last line Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemapindex.xml, will googlebot be able to index the site?
Thanks,
I tested your robots.txt against my own domain (which has a sitemap entry for every page) and Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile returned that they were Disallowed access.
Based on this - I would say the robots.txt file takes precedence over any sitemaps.
Plus, logically speaking - if you block the entire domain, the bot is disallowed access to the sitemap. The sitemap entry just tells crawlers where to find your sitemap - not their authorization to access it.
Even if you allowed the sitemap, I don't think bots would crawl your site - sitemaps are designed more for telling the bot how often to crawl your site, not what they are allowed to crawl.
No I dont think Google will do that. Its actually a question of Good bot and Bad bot. Even if you add a robots.txt file to restrict some area Bots can still crawl. Its actually a question of Yes or No. robots.txt is just like a warning board and not a security wall.
googlebot will not even be able to touch the sitemapindex.xml
the robots.txt is a crawler directive.
the sitemap.xml is fetched via the googlebot crawler.
googlebot will not access the sitemapindex.xml
no crawl coverage, no indexing, no SERP listing
you can test this with google webmaster tools robots.txt verification tool and fetch as googlebot (in the labs section) feature.