Google Says Why It May Ignore Robots.txt And Negatively Impact SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster
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SEJ STAFF Roger Montti 12 hours ago ⋅ 5 min read SEJ STAFF Roger Montti Owner - Martinibuster.com at Martinibuster.com Bio Follow 186 READS Google’s John Mueller answered a question about robots.txt and explained an easy-to-miss mistake that can impact your SEO and website indexing goals. The specific issue was related to search box spam getting indexed by Google, but this mistake can happen to anyone in general under any context. The person who asked the question on Reddit was suffering from a search bar spam attack. What spammers do is search with a query that reflects their spammy niche, and they add a link or a website name. What happens next is that the search bar generates a URL that can be referenced to generate the spammy search result. And that’s what was happening to the person who was asking the question. Their response was to add a line in the robots.txt file to prevent Google from indexing the file. But Google was indexing those spammy search-generated URLs anyway. Someone posted on Reddit that their client’s Shopify search box was generating spammy web pages in response to spammer queries and that Google was indexing them despite a robots.txt file prohibiting Google from indexing those pages. What the client did was redirect those spammy URLs to another web page. The person asking the question didn’t ask how to stop the pages from being indexed (which is what they should have been asking); they asked if those redirected URLs should be marked 404 instead. “Working on a client’s Shopify store where we have the /search added as a disallow in robots.txt, however these search results are still indexed inside of Google. However, if I try to open one of these pages, they have a redirect set and they redirect to another collection page on the store. Should we display a 404 page instead? What is the easiest way to fix this?” Google’s John Mueller took the extra step to identify and review the client’s robots.txt file and identified an error that was causing Google to ignore the directive prohibiting Googlebot from indexing search results pages. “Also, not sure if it’s your site, but the one I found with similar indexed URLs had sections for “user-agent: Googlebot” (in the “START: Custom Rules” block in comments) as well as a lot more in the “user-agent: *” section further down. With robots.txt, the more specific rules win, so if you have a user-agent: Googlebot section, it will *only* use that section. If you want to apply all the rules in the “user-agent: *” section, you need to copy them. Also, if that’s your site, then you can just list all the user-agents that you want to have shared rules for together, eg: What happened is that the client was relying on Google to follow the directives in a line that’s aimed at all user agents, “user-agent: *”, but because there’s another section of the robots.txt file that’s specific to Googlebot, Google ignored the “user-agent: *” directives and obeyed the one that specifically addressed Googlebot. That may sound like a quirk in the way robots.txt works, but it actually makes sense because this enables users to target specific crawlers with unique rules and target everyone else with a different set of rules. WordPress and Shopify both have ways to mitigate search box spam. WordPress and Shopify both have ways to mitigate search box spam. Shopify’s website has a tutorial on how to automatically add a noindex directive to all search results. This will effectively prevent indexing of all search results pages. However, it’s necessary to not block search pages with robots.txt for this to work. Using a noindex directive is more effective than using robots.txt because robots.txt does not control indexing; it only controls crawling. “You can hide pages that aren’t included in your robots.txt.liquid file by customizing the <head> section of your store’s theme.liquid layout file. You need to include some metatag code to stop the indexing of particular pages. Find the theme you want to edit, click the … button to open the actions menu, and then click Edit code. To exclude the search template, paste the following code on a blank line in the <head> section: {% if template contains ‘search’ %} <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> {% endif %}” It’s quite easy to mitigate search box spam with WordPress. Users of the Yoast, Rank Math, and AIOSEO SEO plugins have their search results pages automatically set to noindex by default. Additionally, some page builders and themes like Divi (and its Extra theme) will automatically not generate spammy words and URLs in response to searches and instead will inject a few sentences saying that the search produced no results. Effective SEO requires a wide range of knowledge. Robots.txt contains some quirks that can cause it to be less effective than intended, so it’s useful to read up on the official specifications in order to keep up to date. Read Full Bio SEJ STAFF Roger Montti Owner - Martinibuster.com at Martinibuster.com I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest ... Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. The Modern Guide To Robots.txt: How To Use It Avoiding The Pitfalls 8 Common Robots.txt Issues And How To Fix Them WordPress Robots.txt: What Should You Include? Join 75,000+ Digital Leaders. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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