Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way
It keeps amazing me that I keep seeing people use robots.txt files to prevent sites from being indexed and thus showing up in the search engines. You know why it keeps amazing me? Because robots.txt doesn't actually do the latter, even though it does prevent your site from being indexed.
Let's go through some terms here:
Indexed / Indexing
The process of downloading a site or a page's content to the server of the search engine, thereby adding it to it's "index".
Ranking / Listing / Showing
Showing a site in the search result pages (aka SERPs).
So, while the most common process goes from Indexing to Listing, a site doesn't have to be indexed to be listed. If a link points at a page, domain or wherever, that link will be followed. If the robots.txt on that domain prevents the search engine from indexing that page, it'll still show the URL in the results if it can gather from other variables that it might be worth looking at.
If my explanation above doesn't make sense, have a look at Matt Cutt's video explanation:
So, if you want to effectively hide pages from the search engines, and this might seem contradictory, you need them to index those pages. Why? Because when they index those pages, you can tell them not to List them. There's two ways of doing that: by using robots meta tags, like this (and I've got an article on robots meta tags that's more extensive):
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
The issue with a tag like that is that you have to add it to each and every page. That's why the search engines came up with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. This allows you to specify an HTTP header called X-Robots-Tag, and set the value as you would the meta robots tags value. The cool thing about this is that you can do it for an entire site. So, if your site is running on Apache, and mod_headers is enabled (it usually is), you could add the following single line to your .htaccess file:
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
And it'd have the effect that that entire site can be indexed, but will never be shown in the search results. So, get rid of that robots.txt file with Disallow: / in it, and use the X-Robots-Tag instead!
PDF Tags: Apache, robots.txt
Category: SEO
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Other posts you might like:
36 Responses to “Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way”
Comments closed, if you feel you have something to say:
drop me a line.
by Todd on 17 December, 2009 at 18:34
Thanks for the info. I'm using wp platform to build a few sites and stumbled across your site.
I would like the opposite though, and have google crawl and index my sites. I suppose I could
just add the code: Header set X-Robots-Tag "index, follow"
Thanks again!
by Joost de Valk on 18 December, 2009 at 09:08
You don't have to do anything to get Google to crawl your page, just get links pointing at it from pages that have already been indexed.
by Yves on 17 December, 2009 at 19:39
Hi Joost, thanks for sharing this one.
I'm looking for a variant on that: is it possible to let google crawl just a part of a page? (e.g.: not indexing the comments section).
Thanks for any feedback!
Yves
by Jim Gaudet on 17 December, 2009 at 20:15
I too would like to know if I can do this to specific pages, or directories. Thanks,
by Joost de Valk on 18 December, 2009 at 09:08
You can, with a specific .htaccess in the subdirectory for instance. This depends on your Apache installations configuration though.
by Jim Gaudet on 18 December, 2009 at 14:52
Thanks for the quick response, I did think I could use one in each dir, but wasn't sure...
by DG on 17 December, 2009 at 23:15
Hi,
Please correct me if I'm wrong; you said above:
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"Don't you think the meta code should be:
Header set X-Robots-Tag "index, nofollow"Please advise
by Joost de Valk on 18 December, 2009 at 09:07
No, my advise was right :) The terminology is weird perhaps: it can be crawled by the search engine, just not put into its index.
by DG on 18 December, 2009 at 23:55
Thanks for explaining Joost.
by Luci on 18 December, 2009 at 10:19
So is using the meta noindex/nofollow better than a robots.txt file? I wasn't sure, I thought it might be the other way around for some reason.
Is there any advantage over using the Header set rather than the meta tag? Because to include it on every page, could you just use an include with all the common headers you need in?
by Agent Deepak on 18 December, 2009 at 13:11
Hmm! Nice tip/ I had no idea robots.txt file is not very affective. Thanks.
by Ondre on 18 December, 2009 at 15:00
I'm using just the "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors" setting in the Privacy section of the WP settings. How does that fit into this scheme of things?
I guess non-technical users like me would like to know.
by Nurul Azis on 18 December, 2009 at 16:03
I am gonna need this knowledge about preventing certain page to be indexed... ups.m. not showing on SERPs later. I am bookmarking. Thanks.
by magimmo on 18 December, 2009 at 22:49
Hi,
Just to signal "a coquille" (en little error in french) at the end of your GREAT post ! (as usual I am an fan). You repeat the word that ("that that").
Good to read you.
Alex.
by seo specialist on 19 December, 2009 at 12:38
thanks Joost, I keep learning something new whenever I visit your site to read article. Earlier I were using Meta Tag (nofollow) on Index page and Robots.txt option to avoid getting it listed on SERP. This time I have learned .htaccess method. You rock.
by Rob on 19 December, 2009 at 19:18
Very nice succinct article. I've also used the robots.txt (will this always be supported?) file, but from now on will be using the header method.
-Rob
by Adi Jaffe on 19 December, 2009 at 23:49
You'd mentioned that for google to crawl pages on a site it needs to have links on indexed pages. Do internal links count or only external?
by Joost de Valk on 20 December, 2009 at 20:44
Internal links count to.
by Michael on 20 December, 2009 at 21:31
That is defenitly not the whole truth. Google has a second crawler wich tests if sites are violating
the rules escpelialy cloaking. This robot does not respect the robots.txt and Google even do not want to talk about the robot which is searching for cloaking sites.
One tip to make the googlebot more careful is to adress the bot direct so you add a command to robots.txt like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forbiddenfolder
you add
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /forbiddenfolder
This solves a lot of Problems cause it addreses Google Bot direct.
Perhaps Google does violate the robots.txt with there Cloaking Bot
and Matt does not like questions which point in this direction.
Another issue is did you ever visit a website with Google Adense on it via a
anonym proxy? You will wonder cause no Adsense is shown at the side ...
well this cloaking! Google does it cause they are afraid of click fraud but
is it really a reason to do something which you try to forbid all other Websites?
by Tony on 21 December, 2009 at 10:12
Very useful to know, and as always great tips and easy to follow.
by Miriam Schwab on 21 December, 2009 at 10:25
No matter how much I read about robots.txt it seems that I never completely understood it. Thanks for this very clear and useful explanation of what the different "robot" options can and can't do.
by Peter on 21 December, 2009 at 10:28
Ok, I understand this, but I wondered why you people don't want certain pages indexed? Or not
to appear in rankings. I would do it for a contact us page and t&cs but what else?
by Andy Beard on 21 December, 2009 at 11:02
The best directive pair is noindex follow, otherwise you can lose a lot of links
One gotcha for people doing this using their security setings in WordPress is that you can still end up with RSS feed content that gets crawled, syndicated and indexed.
by Miriam Schwab on 21 December, 2009 at 12:08
Andy, you're saying that even if you add noindex, nofollow, the spiders can still index a site's feed? If that's the case, how can you tell the search engines not to index an RSS feed?
by Andy Beard on 21 December, 2009 at 13:04
You need to only allow access to content if specific conditions are fulfilled
Password either through WordPress or htaccess
IP Address
Useragent
Blocking access to specific user agents or IPs is an uphill battle you never win, far better to block everything and allow specific.
by SEO Doctor on 21 December, 2009 at 11:53
Joost - how about knocking up a plugin for this so we don't need to mess about in .htaccess :)
Pingback: Improve Your Web Site To Achieve Top Search Rankings | Your Information House
by WPexplorer on 21 December, 2009 at 16:57
This is a good tip. I do not quite understand why you would want to disallow an entire site though. As well as some people commented about not wanting their contact pages to be followed, however, I feel that contact pages usually contain some great keywords, that you want Google to check out. And it can be nice for customer interaction if they are too lazy to go to your site and look for the contact link, they can simply "google" the phrase "Contact Yoast".
ps:(you can delete this next part) but do you realize that when a guest is typing in the text area #comment, the text extends further to the right than the white background.
by Tony @ Free Ipod on 21 December, 2009 at 16:59
I have been using a robots.txt file to stop pages being indexed as that's the way I was told to do it when I first set up my websites, and is probably a common story for most people. I didn't realise that it's not the way to do it, and might explain the errors I see in Webmaster Tools.
I knew that robots.txt was for stopping folders from being crawled, but I think I'll now start using the noindex meta tag.
Thanks for the tips.
by Sheila Kyle on 22 December, 2009 at 02:22
Thanks, I'm a newbie and not had a clear understanding of robot.txt. Now I can fix the problem
Thank Sheila Kyle
by Credit on 23 December, 2009 at 19:53
Ok-first of all I'm so glad I found your site. Excellent information all around!
by carmen on 27 December, 2009 at 15:22
I ve seen it many times that Google indexes pages who are blocked in the robots.txt. This solution works perfectly well.
by Gabi on 5 January, 2010 at 18:51
I have a question: not sure that I understood. Crawling is different than indexing. So it does not matter if a page is indexed or not, it could appear in search engines if other sites link to it.
Doing link building on a blocked page could makes that page to appear in search engines?
by Constantin Nemut on 6 January, 2010 at 15:12
First you have to check robots.txt, if you have it check what you have in it.
The command Disallow is preventing to index a site or a certain page.
next you have to check the meta tag and ehat you have in
content attribute.
Google first is looking for robots.txt than for meta tag, if you put correct meta robots tag but you have wrong robots.txt commands will be a mistake.
by Tigre de Fogo on 14 January, 2010 at 21:09
Great tips, Joost, very useful explanation. Thanks.
by culvers on 16 January, 2010 at 05:26
Thanks for this, i was going wrong with this info for a while. My site http://www.videogame-tester.org now gets crawled regularly with no issues. Good work!