Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi

I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google.

Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!!

Thanks

[jacobmartinnn]

Did you check  your robot txt file? Or check if any plugin creating this problem.

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Yes, it's in the robot.txt, that's the problem. Someone had to physically put it in there, but I've no idea why they would.

[AL123al]

This looks like the products are being appended by a parameter ?cgid - there may be other stuff attached to the end of each URL like this below:

e.g. www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid-product=19&controller=product  etc

but canonical URL is www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes

These products may have had a canonical to the base URL which means that there won't be any problem with duplicates being indexed. So all well and good.

Except.....Google has to crawl each of these parameter URLs to find the canonical. In a huge website this means that crawl budget is being consumed by unnecessary crawling of these parameterised URLs.

You can tell Google not to crawl the parameter URLs in search console (at least in the old version you can). But you can also stop Google crawling these URLS unnecessarily by blocking them in robots txt if you are sure that the parameters are not changing how the page is looking in search.

So long story short is that is why you may see that the URLS with parameters are being blocked in robots.txt. The canonical version URLS will be getting crawled just fine since they don't have any parameters and hence not being blocked.

Hope that makes sense?

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Thanks AL123al! The base URL's (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes) do seem to be getting crawled here & there, and some are ranking which is great. But I think the only place they can get crawled is the sitemap, which has has over 28,000 URLs on one page (another thing I need to fix)!

So if Googlebot gets to the parameter URL through category pages (www.example.com/product-category/ladies-shoes?cgid...) and sees it's blocked, I'm guessing it can't see it's important to us (from the website hierarchy) or the canonical tag, so I'm presuming it's seriously damaging or power in getting products ranked

In Screaming Frog, 112,000 get crawled and 68% are blocked by robots. 17,000 are URL's which contain "?cgid", which I don't think is too big for Googlebot to crawl, the websites has a pretty good authority so I think we have a pretty deep crawl.

So I suppose what really want to know is will removing "?cgid" from the robots file really damage the site? I my opinion, I think it'll really help

[AL123al]

Hello,

The canonical product URLS will be getting crawled just fine as they are not blocked in the robots.txt. Without understanding your problem completely, I think the guys before you were trying to stop all the duplicate URLS with parameters being crawled and just leaving Google to crawl the canonicals - which is what you want.

If you remove the parameter from robots.txt then Google will crawl everything including the parameter URLS. This will waste crawl budget. So better that Google is only crawling the canonicals.

Regarding the sitemap, being present on the sitemap will help Googlebot decide what to prioritise crawling but won't stop it finding other URLS if there is good internal linking.

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Thanks again AL123al!

I would be concerned about my internal linking because of this problem. I've always wanted to keep important pages within 3 clicks of the Homepage. My worry here is that while these products can get clicked by a user within 3 clicks of the Homepage, they're blocked to Googlebot.

So the product URLS are only getting crawled in the sitemap, which would be hugely ineffcient? So I think I have to decide whether opening up these pages will improve my linking structure for Google to crawl the product pages, but is that important than increasing the amount of pages it's able to crawl and wasting crawl budget?