Page History: 6 methods to control what and how your content appears in search engines
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Page Revision: 2010/06/27 13:31
1. Use a robots.txt robots exclusion file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /sales/
Disallow: /images/
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /sales
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Pattern matching
Some search engines support extensions to the original robots.txt
specification which allow for URL pattern matching.
| Pattern Character |
Description |
Example |
Search Engine Support |
| * |
matches a sequence of characters |
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /print*/ |
Google, Yahoo, Bing |
| $ |
matches the end of a URL |
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /*.pdf$ |
Google, Yahoo, Bing |
References:
Google,
Yahoo!,
Bing (Sad
note: Microsoft Bing’s help system is awful – they don’t allow direct
linking to a topic section). At the time of this writing, Ask does not
officially support these extensions.
2. Use “noindex” page meta tags
Pages can be tagged using “meta data” to indicate they should not be indexed by search engines. Simply add the following code to any page you do not want a search engine to index:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Keep in mind that search engines will still spider these pages on a regular basis. The continue to crawl “noindex” pages in order to check the current status of a page’s robots meta tag.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="index" />
3. Password protect sensitive content
Sensitive content is usually protected by requiring visitors to enter a username and password. Such secure content won’t be crawled by search engines. Passwords can be set at the web server level or at the application level. For server level logon setup, consult the Apache Authentication Documentation or the Microsoft IIS documentation.
4. Nofollow: tell search engines not to spider some or all links on a page
As a response to blog comment “spam”, search engines introduced a way for websites to tell a search engine spider to ignore one or more links on a page. In theory, the search engine won’t “follow”, or crawl, a link which has been “protected”. To keep all links on a page off-limits, use a nofollow meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
To specify nofollow at the link level, add the attribute rel with the value nofollow to the link:
<a href="mypage.html" rel="nofollow" />
5. Don’t link to pages you want to keep out of search engines
Search engines won’t index content unless they know about it. Thus, if no one links to pages nor submits them to a search engine, a search engine won’t find them. At least this is the theory. In reality, the web is so large, one can assume that sooner or later a search engine will find a page – someone will link to it.
6. Use X-Robots-Tag in your http headers
In solution 1 above, we noted that use of robots.txt explicitly
exposes some of your site’s structure, something you may want to avoid.
Unfortunately, solution 2, use of meta tags, only works for html
documents – there’s no way to specify indexing instructions for PDF,
odt, doc and other non-html files.
In July 2007,
Google
officially introduced a solution to this problem: the ability to
deliver indexing instructions in the http header information which is
sent by the web server along with an object.
Yahoo! joined
Google by supporting this tag in December 2007. Microsoft first
mentions
x-robots-tag in a June 2008 blog
post,
although I don’t see their webmaster documentation updated. They do
make one mention of X-Robots-Tag in their
Bing guide
for webmasters.
The web server simply needs to add
X-Robots-Tag and
any of the
Google
or Yahoo! supported meta tag values to the http header for an
object:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Each search engine provides for notification of copyright violations, a procedure to follow in the event the copyright violator proves
non-responsive.
Automated Content Access Protocol
Several commercial publishing associations have united behind a
project to allow for the specification of more granular restrictions on
content use by search engines. The project,
Automated Content
Access Protocol, appears to be as much a desire to share in the
profits that search engines accrue when presenting abstracts of a
publisher’s content, rather than a response to limitations in the
current robots.txt and meta tag solutions.
At the time of this writing (February 2007), no search engines have
yet announced support for this project.
Additional Search Engine Content Display Control
Several search engines also support ways for webmasters to further
control the use of their content by search engines.
No archive
Most search engines allow a user to view a copy of the web page that
was actually indexed by the search engine. This snapshot of a page in
time is called the cache copy. Internet visitors can find this
functionality to be really useful if the link is no longer available or
the site is down.
There are several reasons to consider disabling the cache view
feature for a page or an entire website.
- Web site owners may not want visitors viewing data, such as price lists, which are not necessarily up to date.
- Web pages viewed in a search engine cache may not display properly if embedded images are unavailable and/or browser code such as CSS and JS does not properly execute.
- Cached page views will not show up in web log based web analytics systems. Reporting in tagged based solutions may be incorrect as well as the cached view is on a third party domain, not yours.
If you want a search engine to index your page without allowing a
user to view a cached copy, use the noarchive attribute which
is officially supported by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask:
{{<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />}}
Microsoft documents the nocache attribute, which is
equivalent to noarchive, also supported by Microsoft; there is
no reason to use it.
No abstract option: nosnippet
Google offers an option to suppress the generation of page abstracts,
called snippets, in the search results. Use the following meta
tag in your pages:
{{<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet" />}}
They note that this also sets the noarchive option. We would
suggest you set it explicitly if that is what you want.
Page title option: noodp
Search engines generally use a page’s html title when creating a
search result title, the link a user clicks on to arrive at a website.
In some cases, search engines may use an alternative title taken from a
directory such as dmoz, the open directory, or the Yahoo!
directory. Historically, many sites have had poor titles –
i.e. just the company name, or worse, “default page
title“. Use of a human edited title from a well known directory was
often a good solution. As webmasters improve the usability of their
sites, page titles have become much more meaningful – and often better
choices than the open directory title. The noodp
metatag, supported by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, allows a webmaster to
indicate that a page’s title should be used rather than the dmoz
title.
{{<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />}}
Similarly, Yahoo! offers a “noydir” option to keep Yahoo!
from using Yahoo! Directory titles in search results for a site’s pages:
{{<meta name="slurp" content="noydir">}}
Bing Site Preview
Microsoft’s Bing offers a thumbnail preview of most search results,
what Bing calls Document Preview. This isn’t new, Live
Search offered a preview
of the first six search results in some geographies. Ask.com
also offers a similar feature called binoculars.
Bing’s preview can be disabled by specifying nopreview as
a meta robots value for a page. Microsoft also notes
support for x-robots-tag: nopreview in http headers, the
first time I’ve noted Microsoft mentioning support for the x-robots-tag.
Microsoft previously supported different methods to disable the
thumbnail previews. They were the searchpreview robot in the
robots.txt file,
{{User-agent: searchpreview
Disallow: /}}
or by using a meta tag containing “noimageindex,nomediaindex”:
{{<meta name="robots" content="noimageindex,nomediaindex" />}}
This meta tag was used by AltaVista at one point; it is not known to
be used by any of the other major search engines.
Expires After with unavailable_after
One problem with search engines is the delay which occurs from when
content is removed from a website and when that content actually
disappears from search engine results. Typical time dependent content
includes event information and marketing campaigns.
Pages removed from a website which still appear in search engine
results generally result in a frustrating user experience – the Internet
user clicks through to the website only to find themselves landing on a
“Page not found” error page.
In July 2007, Google introduced the “unavailable_after” tag which
allows a website to specify in advance when a page should be removed
from search engine results, i.e. when it will expire. This tag can be
specified as a html meta tag attribute value:
{{<meta name="robots" content="unavailable_after: 21-Jul-2037 14:30:00 CET" />}}
or in an X-robots http header:
{{X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 7 Jul 2037 16:30:00 GMT}}
Google says the date format should be one of those specified by the
ambiguous and obsolete RFC 850. We hope Google
clarifies what date formats their parser can read by referering to a
current date standard, such as IETF
Internet standard RFC 3339. We’d also like to see detailed page
crawl information in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Not only could Google
show when a page was last crawled, they could add expiration
information, confirming proper use of the unavailable_after
tag. At one point, Google did show an approximation of the number of
pages crawled relative to the number specified in a sitemap, but that
feature was removed. This is one case where Google should follow Yahoo’s
example.
Pro
- A nice way to ensure search engine results are syncronized with current website content.
Con
- Old date specification RFC 850 is too ambiguous, thus subject to error.
- unavailable_after support is currently limited to Google. We do hope the other major search engines embrace this approach as well.
Added 2007-07-27.
Crawl Delay
While not directly related to content, I was asked about regulating
crawling speed in a SEO class, so here’s the formal answer. Both Yahoo!
and Microsoft’s Bing support teh robot exclusion protocol value crawl-delay.
Yahoo cites
a delay value in the form x.x where 5 or 10 is “high”. While Yahoo
doesn’t specify the delay units, Microsoft uses seconds.
{{
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 0.5
User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 4
}}{{}}
Google does not support Crawl-delay nor will bots which
are imposters. For Google, there is a setting which can be changed in
Google’s Webmaster Tools for a site. Now that you know you can set a
crawl delay, you probably shouldn’t. Search engine crawlers need to
access your site’s contents to find any changes – new pages, deleted
pages, changed pages. It is in your interest that they do this
frequently. Except in rare occurrences, the major search engines won’t
be hammering your site. Imposters, maybe, but they won’t look at the
robots.txt content.
Meta Tag Summary
The following table summarizes the page level meta tags which can be
used to specify how a search engine crawls a page. Positive tags, such
as follow, are not listed as they are the default. Tags
are case insensitive and can usually be combined.
| Tag |
Description |
Search Engine Support |
| noindex |
Don’t index a page (implies noarchive and nocache) |
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask |
| nofollow |
Don’t follow, i.e. crawl, the links on the page |
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask |
| noarchive |
Don’t present a cached copy of the indexed page |
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask |
| nocache |
Same as noarchive |
Bing |
| nosnippet |
Don’t display an abstract for this page. May also imply noarchive. |
Google |
| noodp |
Don’t use an Open Directory title for this page |
Google, Yahoo!, Bing |
| nopreview |
Don’t display site preview in search results |
Bing |
| noimageindex, nomediaindex |
Don’t crawl images / objects specified in this page |
Windows Live: uses this to disable a page
preview thumbnail |
| unavailable_after: RFC
850 formats> |
Don’t offer in search results after this date and time. In reality, Google
says:
This information is treated as a removal request: it will
take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to
disappear from the search results. We currently only support
unavailable_after for Google web search results.
|
Google |
| notranslate |
Don’t allow Google to automatically translate a page. This one was
introduced, apparently without thinking too much. The syntax takes the
noun “google” instead of “robots”: (2008-10-14) |
Google |
Posts
http://www.antezeta.com/blog/avoid-search-engine-indexinghttp://www.antezeta.com/blog/x-robots-taghttp://www.antezeta.com/blog/robots-nocontenthttp://www.antezeta.com/blog/sitemap-standardhttp://www.antezeta.com/blog/bing-seo-recommendationshttp://www.antezeta.com/blog/flash-problems