How to Hide Directories in Search?

[hfranz]

I noticed bad 404 error links in Google Webmaster Tools and they were pointing to directories that do not have an actual page, but hold information.

Ex: there are links pointing to our PDF folder which holds all of our pdf documents. If i type in , example.com/pdf/ it brings up a unformated webpage that displays all of our PDF links.

How do I prevent this from happening. Right now I am blocking these in my robots.txt file, but if i type them in, they still appear.

Or should I not worry about this?

[icecarats]

I would suggest 301'ing them to their /index.htm or /pdf.htm equivalents. If you don't know, a 301 is a signal to a web browser (or search crawler) saying "this page has permanently moved, please go to (otherpage.htm) instead".

Here's a good SEOMoz article explaining it a bit more:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

What might be more of a concern, is it sounds like your web server has directory browsing enabled. This could be a security issue (depending on your web server setup). Generally you don't want to expose directories if you don't have to because it gives a potential attacker insight into your system setup. Here's an example how to do it in Apache:

www.camelrichard.org/topics/Apache/Turn_OffDirectoryBrowsing

And IIS:

technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731109(v=ws.10).aspx

If you like I can confirm if you have open directories if you give me the link, either here or through private message.

[Klarke]

Blocking it in robots.txt will work to hide it from search engines.

If you want to hide it from users or people to who type in the url, you can simply drop a blank "index.html" in the /pdf folder.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I'd create an index.html for the directory, and then redirect it somewhere. This way, you're capturing the inbound links and then rescuing some of the inbound juice.

Otherwise, you can also check out this post for more info on other solutions and modifying your htaccess file to prevent the directory view - http://perishablepress.com/better-default-directory-views-with-htaccess/

[hfranz]

I really don't want to 301 redirect them as they are just holding files. This is happening with my includes file too. that holds our header, footer, navigation etc. I can check with our hosting company to find out.

[hfranz]

Will turning of directory browsing affect Search for all directories?

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed with Valerie that step 1 is to turn off those directory listing pages - that can be a security issue and you don't necessarily want people to see/access the whole list. Also, make doubly sure you don't have any internal links to that directory (Google crawled it somehow).

Generally, Robots.txt should prevent crawling, but it's not foolproof, and it's pretty bad about removing pages once they're indexed. If you can block the page from browsing and return a 404 for the root page, that should be fine. The other option would be to have the page removed in Google Webmaster Tools. You could request removal for the entire folder, but I'm guessing that you may want the actual PDFs indexed.

[icecarats]

Basically it shouldn't really have an affect; those unformatted file listings are literally the web server automatically saying 'here's the files that are in this folder', there's no meta tags, description, on page elements, etc.

If you have these pages and they're ranking well, you generally don't want them to be. The automatic file browsing pages don't have your name, your company, etc. in them, and they're generally pretty ugly. They also theoretically could be 'stealing' juice from your 'real' pages, if your internal structure isn't flowing relevance properly.

Basically what I'm saying is that if these pages are having some kind of SEO effect, you probably don't want them to be since they're so basic.

Also I can't overstate the security concerns that directory browsing might be introducing. If someone can directory browse to where your code lives (.php, .aspx.vb, whatever) they may be able to read it. Code sometimes has important things like logins, passwords, merchant account ids, etc. in it that you definitely don't want people reading.

[hfranz]

My hosting company turned off directory browsing and now everything is how it should be. So to my understanding, if the server sees a file that does not have a index file, it should not be view able and should be forbidden. This shoujld not affect us from an SEO standpoint should it? My hosting company said they disabled all directories in our site, however everything still works, except for the forbidden file directories.

[icecarats]

Yes, a visit to example.com/dir should now return a 404 error (if you haven't done any redirecting/canonicalizing). This will increase your 404 count in Web Master tools but it's far preferable to the alternative. If you're not redirecting the robots.txt will eventually work and hopefully the links will just fall out of WMT.