Product files (not images) indexed by Google?

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9 years 6 months ago #232401

-- url of the page with the problem -- : www.filkab.solar
-- HikaShop version -- : 2.6.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.4.8
-- PHP version -- : 5.3.15

Hi,
Recently I've noticed that Google indexed lots of urls from the type:
mydomain/products/product/download/file_id-164
From SEO point of view I guess this is no good at all. How can I avoid it?

If you do "site:www.filkab.solar" google search you'll find lot's of these indexed urls in the last result pages.

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9 years 6 months ago #232408

Hi,

Add a disallow rule on the products/product/download/ folder in your robots.txt to avoid that.
tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

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9 years 6 months ago #232436

Hi nicolas,
From what I've read on the topic disallow rule in the robots.txt file is not a guarantee that the url will not be shown in teh search results:
"When you block URLs from being indexed in Google via robots.txt, they may still show those pages as URL only listings in their search results." - this is from the link you provided.

Google also states that they have "workarounds" to detect and list disallowed by the robots.txt file pages.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
"You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because other pages might point to your page, and your page could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex tags or directives"

Is this the only option?

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9 years 6 months ago #232463

Hi,

You could try the solution they propose:
Create the folders products/product/download/ and add in it a .htaccess to restrict the access to that folder.
Or you could also ask the unlisting of these URLs to google:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
You could also implement these different solutions.
Even the robots.txt file, while not perfect should already be good enough for your problem.

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