How to avoid Google Index these links?

  • Resolved omriz

    (@omriz)


    7 years, 1 month ago

    Hi, a quick question: I want to avoid google indexing my affiliate links with this plugin. Until now, I simply added this line to my robots.txt file which I thought will block google indexing all the links:

    Disallow: /go/

    However, today I got this message in my search console: “New Index coverage issue detected for site – Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”

    So my questions are:

    1. Is there any way to ensure Google won’t index all the links made with this plugin?

    2. Do I really need to fix the issue after the warning from Google? Should I simply remove the Disallow: /go/ from my robots.txt file?

    Can it affect the rankings of my site? Of course, I don’t need these affiliate links to be indexed.

    Will be happy to know what you think.

    Thanks

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    That’s should be fine, really. You don’t want Google to index those which is why you’ve added that to your robots.txt file.

    With this warning Google is just making sure that this was what you intended to do.

    Brecht

    Thread Starter omriz

    (@omriz)

    Thanks BrechtVds

    1. So, you suggest simply ignoring this message from Google, and that’s it? No need to remove the piece of code from the robots.txt file?

    2. I noticed that Google did index a few links for some reason (about 3 out of 200). Any way to make these disappear from their search results? Or just leave it this way because it doesn’t have any real effect?

    Thanks again for the help

    Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    I need to correct myself a little bit: technically the line in your robots.txt file basically tells Google not to automatically crawl those pages. I think they can still index those if you have a dofollow link to that page somewhere.

    I’ll have to do some testing for the next update and see if we can add the noindex meta tag to the head.

    Brecht

    Thread Starter omriz

    (@omriz)

    Thanks BrechtVds

    So basically, you still recommend to simply ignoring this message from Google, and that’s it? Or do you recommend changing something in my robots.txt file or doing something else? Just want to be sure that this issue won’t have any negative SEO effect
    Thanks again

    Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    I would just ignore it for now. Should not have a negative impact.

    Brecht

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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