100K Webmaster Central Not Found Links?

[seointern]

http://screencast.com/t/KLPVGTzM I just logged into our Webmaster Central account to find that it shows 100k links that are not found? After searching through all of them they all appear to be from our search bar, with no results? Are we doing something wrong here?

[loopyal]

the search bar results are good for searchers but not for search engines. You can stop all search engines and Roger (the seomoz crawler) from going into those pages by adding an entry to your robots.txt file. Roger only responds to his own section of the robots file, so anything you make global will not work for him.

User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /search/*

[AlanBleiweiss]

Just to support Alan Gray's response, I'll say it's very important to block crawlers from your site search, because it not only throws errors (bots try to guess what to put in a search box), but also because any search results that get into the index will cause content conflicts, dilute ranking values, and worst case scenario, potentially create the false impression that you have a lot of very thin content / near duplicate content pages.

[seointern]

We didn't have these errors showing up previously, so that's why I was really suspicious? Also we have Joost De Valk's SEO plugin installed on our site & I thought there was an option to turn off the searches from being indexed?

[seointern]

Ok, I just did a little more research into this, to see how Yoast was handling this within the plugin & came across this article: http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

In the article he stats that this is already included within the plugin on search pages:

I just confirmed this, by doing this search on my site & looking at the code: http://www.discountqueens.com/?s=candy

So this has always been in place. Why would I still have the 100K not found links still showing up?

[loopyal]

It is because Roger ignores those META tags.

Also, google often ignores them too.

The robots.txt file is a much better option for those crawlers.

There are some crawlers that ignore the robots file too, but you have no control over them unless you can put their IPs in the firewall or add code to ignore all of their requests.

[seointern]

Ok, I've posted a question on Yoast.com blog to see what other options we might have? Thanks for the help!

[loopyal]

We all know nothing lasts forever.

A code change can do all kinds of things.

Things that were important are sometimes less important, or not important at all.

Sometimes yesterdays advice no longer is true.

If you make a change, or even if you make no change, but the crawler or the indexer changes, then we can be surprised at the results.

While working on this other thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-no-follow-ing-a-folder-influences-also-its-subfolders#post-74287

I did a test and checked my logs. A nofollow meta tag and a nofollow link do not stop the crawlers from following. What it does (we think) is to not pass pagerank. That is all it does.

That is why the robots.txt file is the only way to tell the crawlers to stop following down a tree. (until there is another way)

[seointern]

Sorry to open this back up after a month, in adding this to the robot.txt file is there something that needs to be done within the code of the site? Or can I simply update the robots.txt file within Google Webmaster Tools?

I was hoping to get a response from Yoast on his blog post, it seems there were a number of questions similar to mine, but he didn't ever address them.

Thanks,

BJ

[loopyal]

Hello BJ.

The robots.txt file must be on your server, in the document root.

Here is information about how to configure robots.txt

Note that is does have a warning at the end, about how you could possibly lose some link juice, but that is probably a much smaller problem than the problem you are trying to fix.

Nothing is perfect, and with the rate that google changes its mind, who knows what is the right thing to do this month.

Once you have edited robots.txt, you don't need to do anything.

• except I just had a thought - how to get google to remove those items from your webmaster tools. I think you should be able to tell them to purge those entries from GWT. Set it so you can see 500 to a page and then just cycle through and mark them fixed.

[seointern]

Ya, I read through that article yesterday & see that they recommend the same setting as the Yoast plugin should be doing? Although I didn't ever get a response from me to see if there is something missing?

For now, I plan on adding this to the robots.txt file & see what results I get?

Do you know the time frame that it takes to get the updates in GWT? Will this update within a few weeks or would it take longer than that?

Thanks for all the help!

BJ