Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
-
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
-
No problem Tom. Thanks for the additional info — that is helpful to know.
-
Bryan,
I’m glad that you found what you where looking for.
I must have missed the part about it being 100% Instapage when you said CMS I thought meant something on else with instapage I think of it as landing pages not a CMS
I want to help so you asked about Google search console how often you need to request google index your site.
First make sure
You should have 5 urls in Google search console
your domain, http://www. , http:// , https://www. & https://
- nomader.com
- https://www.nomader.com
- https://nomader.com
- http;//www.nomader.com
- http://nomader.com
you should not have to requests google index once you’re pages are in googles index. There is no time line to make you need to requests google index.
Use search consoles index system to see if you need to make a request and look for notifications
Times you should request google crawl when adding new unlinked pages , when making big changes to your site , whatever adding pages with out a xml sitemap or fixing problems / testing.
I want to help so as you said you’re going to be using Shopify.
Just before you go live running on Shopify in the future you should make a xml sitemap of the Instapage site
You can do it for free using https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
you’re running now name it /sitemap_ip.xml or /sitemap2.xml upload it to Shopify
& make sure it’s not the same name so it will work with your Shopify xml sitemap /sitemap.xml
submit the /sitemap._ip.xml to search console then add the Shopify /sitemap.xml
You can run multiple xml sitemaps as long as they are not overlapping
just remember never add non-200 page, 404s, 300sno flow , no index or redirects to a xml sitemap ScreamingFrog will ask if you want to when you’re making the sitemap.
Shopify will make its own xml sitemaps and and having the current site as a second xml sitemap will help to make sure your change to the site will not hurt the intipage par of the Shopify site
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en
know adding a XML Sitemap is a smart move
I hope that was of help I’m so about miss what you meant.
respectfully,
Tom
-
Thanks so much for your thoughtful, detailed response. That answers my question.
-
Bryan,
If I understand your intent, you want your pages indexed. I see that your site has 5 pages indexed (/, /help, /influencers, /wholesale, /co-brand). And that you have some other pages (e.g. /donations), which are not indexed, but these have "noindex" tags explicitly in their HEAD sections.
Not having a robots.txt file is equal to having a robots.txt file with a directive to allow crawling of all pages. This is per http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html, where they say "The presence of an empty "/robots.txt" file has no explicit associated semantics, it will be treated as if it was not present, i.e. all robots will consider themselves welcome."
So, if you have no robots.txt file, the search engine will feel free to crawl everything it discovers, and then whether or not it indexes those pages will be guided by presence or absence of NOINDEX tags in your HEAD sections. From a quick browse of your site and its indexed pages, this seems to be working properly.
Note that I'm referencing a distinction between "crawling" and "indexing". The robots.txt file provides directives for crawling (i.e. access discovered pages, and discovering pages linked to those). Whereas the meta robots tags in the head provide directives for indexing (i.e. including the discovered pages in search index and displaying those as results to searchers). And in this context, absence of a robots.txt file simply allows the search engine to crawl all of your content, discover all linked pages, and then rely on meta robots directives in those pages for any guidance on whether or not to index those pages it finds.
As for a sitemap, while they are helpful for monitoring indexation, and also provide help to search engines to discover all desired pages, in your case it doesn't look especially necessary. Again, I only took a quick look, but it seems you have your key pages all linked from your home page, and you have meta directives in pages you wish to keep out of the index. And you have a very small number of pages. So, it looks like you are meeting your crawl and indexation desires.
-
Hi Tom,
Unfortunately, Instapage is a proprietary CMS that does not currently support robots.txt or site maps. Instapage is primarily built for landing pages, and not actual websites so that's their reasoning for not adding SEO support for basics like robots.txt and site maps.
Thanks anyway for your help.
Best,
-Bryan
-
hi
so I see the problem now
https://www.nomader.com/robots.txt
Does not have a robots.txt file upload it to the root of your server or specific place where Developer and/or CMS / Hosting company recommends I could not figure out what to type of CMS you’re useing if you’re using one
make a robots.txt file using
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/generator/
https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/exportrobots.php
https://outdoorsrank.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
It will look like this below.
User-Agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: https://www.nomader.com/sitemap.xml
it looks like you’re using Java for your website?
https://builtwith.com/detailed/nomader.com
I am guessing you’re not using a subdomain to host the Landing Pages?
If you are using a subdomain you would have to create a robots.txt file for that but from everything I can see you’re using your regular domain. So you would simply create these files ( i’m in a car on a cell phone so I did quick to see check if you have a XML site map file but I do think you do
https://www.nomader.com/sitemap.xml
You can purchase a tool called Screaming Frog SEO spider if your site is over 500 pages you will need to pay for it it’s approximately $200 however you will be able to create a wonderful site map you can also create a XML site map by googling xml sitemap generators. However I would recommend Screaming Prod because you can separate the images and it’s a very good tool to have.
Because you will need to generate a new site map whenever you update your site or add Landing Pages it will be done using screaming frog and uploaded to the same place in the server. Unless you can create a dynamic sitemap using whatever website of the infrastructure structure using.
Here are the directions to add your site Google Search Console / Google Webmaster Tools
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en
If you need any help with any of this please do not hesitate to ask I am more than happy to help you can also generate a site map in the old version of Google Webmaster Tools / Google Search Console.
Hope this helps,
Tom
-
Thanks for the reply Thomas. Where do you see that my site has the robots.txt file? As far as I can tell, it is missing. Instapage does not offer robots.txt as I mentioned in my post. Here's a community help page of theirs where this question was asked and answered: https://help.instapage.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/213622968-Sitemap-and-Robotx-txt
So in the absence of having a robots.txt file, I guess the only way to counter this is to manually request a fetch/index from Google console? How often do you recommend I do this?
-
You don’t need to worry about instapage & robot.txt your site has the robots.txt & instapage is not set to no index.
so yes use google search console to fetch / index the pages it’s very easy if you read the help information I posted below
https://help.instapage.com/hc/en-us#
hope that helps,
Tom
-
If you cannot turn off “Meta Noindex“ you cannot fix it with robots.txt I suggest you contact the developer of the Instapage landing pages app. If it’s locked to no index as you said that is the only of for countering a pre coded by the company Meta Noindex issue?
I will look into this for you I bet that you can change it but not via robots.txt. I
will update it in the morning for you.
All the best,
Tom
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
No indexing url including query string with Robots txt
Dear all, how can I block url/pages with query strings like page.html?dir=asc&order=name with robots txt? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?
I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0