: Is it good practice to block crawling of a website's privacy policy with robots.txt? I'm not sure whether I should add my website's privacy policy to my robots.txt file or not. I want to follow
I'm not sure whether I should add my website's privacy policy to my robots.txt file or not. I want to follow good SEO practice. I have no reason to hide my privacy policy.
Arguments against: I want to be visible and not seen to be hiding legal pages. It's unlikely, but some users might genuinely want to find it in a search engine.
Arguments for: solicitors/lawyers tend to reuse these documents so the text I've been supplied may not be unique. The page isn't really one that's important for people to land on from a search engine.
Any advice?
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Your arguments against not blocking the indexing of these legal pages are valid. Matt Cuts did a video about this very topic here in 2009:
While it's not a clear "yes" or "no" from Google, the second important question to ask is "are these pages important to my users?". If yes, Google needs to find them.
Based on our research we've written about this topic on our blog, we find that these are common legal pages. Google knows that these policies are required by law, that the legal pages are not content-rich and that you're most likely to have similar content as other websites on these pages.
If you do decide to block these pages from being indexed, use meta robots tag instead of the robots.txt:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Any error in the robots.txt might get your entire website unindexed by Google. The meta robots tag is the safe option to manage this.
Avoid making any reference to the privacy or terms and conditions page in the robots.txt. The Best SEO practice would be to create a meta robots with noindex, nofollow instructions in the head section as follow:
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow”">
This way your privacy page won’t be indexed.
You need to make this page accessible by the user by creating an internal link in the footer. This way search engines will be able to find the page too and then find the noindex, nofollow instructions.
You can use other approaches, but to me is the best one. Make your website always crawlable and use robots file to safe yourself and others crawling resources.
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