Coverage Issues in Google Search Console

I try to pay attention to the different coverage issues in the Google Search Console. One thing I have been battling and losing is it keeps showing my outgoing links to casinos as "indexed but blocked by robots.txt" All my link are /go/betonline, or /go/5dimes etc etc. I have always blocked these url's in my robots.txt file and the redirect them to the actual linking url in my htaccess file.

So why does Google still says they are indexed but blocked by the robots file. If they are blocked shouldn't Google know not to index them? I have even put <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/> in the /go/5dimes/ files hoping that would help.

I know it is probably not a big deal, but I just wish they would quit showing as "Valid with Warnings" in my coverage section.

Thanks,

Travis

if you remove them from the search index [via gsc] then they will be removed when goog next tries to recrawl them but cannot due to robots directive.

ensure the links pointing to these URLs have the attribute rel="nofollow" as well

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Originally Posted by TravG

So why does Google still says they are indexed but blocked by the robots file. If they are blocked shouldn't Google know not to index them? I have even put <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/> in the /go/5dimes/ files hoping that would help.

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Google has always indexed URLs even if it could not crawl them. You used to see them all the time and we called them "URL-only listings". While they don't appear in search results much any more Google still "knows" about them. They are found on other pages that Google crawls.

These reports don't imply you have a problem on your site. You don't need to do anything about them.