There are multiple ways to tell search engines how to behave on your site. These are called “crawl directives”. They allow you to:
We write a lot about these crawl directives as they are a very important weapon in an SEO’s arsenal. We try to keep these articles up to date as standards and best practices evolve.
The robots.txt file is a file you can use to tell search engines where they can and cannot go on your site. Learn how to use it to your advantage!
Trying to prevent indexing of your site by using robots.txt is a no-go, use X-Robots-Tag or a meta robots tag instead! Here's why.
The canonical URL allows you to tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Learn how to use rel=canonical!
Want to keep a page out of the search results? Ask yourself if it should be on your site anyways. If it should, use a robots meta tag to prevent it from being indexed.
An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – …
Read: "What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know"
The robots.txt file is a file you can use to tell search engines where they can and cannot go on your site. Learn how to use it to your advantage!
Read: "The ultimate guide to robots.txt"
If you want to keep your page out of the search results, there are a number of things you can do. Most of ’em are not hard and you can implement these without a ton of technical knowledge. If you can check a box, your content management system will probably have an option for that. …
Read: "How to keep your page out of the search results"
This guide discusses what hreflang is, what it is for and gives in-depth information on how to implement it for your multilingual websites.
Read: "hreflang: the ultimate guide"
Some of the pages of your site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engines or even getting traffic to your site. These pages need to be there, as glue for other pages or simply because regulations require them to be accessible on your website. If you regularly read our blog, you’ll know …
Read: "Which pages should I noindex or nofollow?"
Why should you block your internal search result pages for Google? Well, how would you feel if you are in dire need for the answer to your search query and end up on the internal search pages of a certain website? That’s one crappy experience. Google thinks so too. And prefers you not to have these internal …
Read: "Block your site’s search result pages"
With the meta robots tag you can control what search engine spiders do on your site. Learn what it does right here!
Read: "The ultimate guide to the meta robots tag"
In our major Yoast SEO 7.0 update, there was a bug concerning attachment URLs. We quickly resolved the bug, but some people have suffered anyhow (because they updated before our patch). This post serves both as a warning and an apology. We want to ask all of you to check whether your settings for the …
Read: "Media / attachment URL: what to do with them?"
Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails at it. Let’s shed some more light on crawling first. Crawling is the process where a search engine tries to visit every page of your website via a bot. A search engine bot finds a link to your website and starts …
Read: "What are crawl errors?"
Your site needs to be up and running if you want to be found in search engines. If you aren’t blocking anything — deliberately or accidentally — search engine spiders can crawl and index it. You probably know that Yoast SEO has lots of options to determine what does and doesn’t need to be indexed, but …
Read: "Yoast SEO & Ryte: Checking your site’s indexability"
There are multiple ways to tell search engines how to behave on your site. These are called “crawl directives”. They allow you to:
We write a lot about these crawl directives as they are a very important weapon in an SEO’s arsenal. We try to keep these articles up to date as standards and best practices evolve.