Robots.txt ?

[mortgage-pro-seo]

I am using phpbb for one site. The problem is that it generate multiple urls. One of the Urls is crap mortgagesaver.org/forum/refi-w-540-fico-vt1539.html?start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Can I use robots.txt to prevent urls being indexed that have ? or highlight in the url

[Jean-Luc]

You can use robots.txt to prevent URL's starting with some text to be indexed.

Example :User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/refi-w-540-fico-vt1539.html?This will prevent that URL's starting with /forum/refi-w-540-fico-vt1539.html? are indexed.

This is probably not practical in your case, if you have hundeds of these URL's.

Jean-Luc

[mortgage-pro-seo]

I need a solution for thousands of pages.

[chengfu]

There is no solution for excluding files based on url-parameters using robots.txt. To ban those you will have to change the forum code and insert the robots meta-tag into the output when the highlight-parameter is given.

Something like this at the right place should do the job:

if ($_GET["highlight"] != "") {
echo '<meta name="robots" value="noindex,follow,noarchive">';
}

[seolion]

even I have similar prob in my new forum. But here I am experimenting something else.

I have the bot indexing mod installed. (I still dont know whether it is working properly)

For those urls which is already indexed with session ids, I have site wide noarchive tags. This will prevent my pages to not to go into supplemental results.

I have a sitemap with all the major urls without session ids, I hope over a period of time, the site will get crawled normally.

[mortgage-pro-seo]

Any other creative ideas here?

[alifan]

You could use a JPG pin number function but that could really annoy users