en
/login
Koval SEO

A link leads to a page blocked by robots.txt

In the reportInternal links point to robots-blocked URLs

internal_link_to_robots_blocked · Review item

Short answer

This appears when a page on your site links to an address of yours that robots.txt disallows for Googlebot. Google does not crawl the address, but it can still index it from links and show it without a description. Link only to addresses Google may crawl, or unblock the address.

Severity: Low. For review: the block may be deliberate, and the address itself is not requested.

Why it matters

Google's introduction to robots.txt says it is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google: a disallowed URL can still be indexed if it is linked from other places, and then appears in results without a description. A link from your own pages is one such place.

What to do

  1. Look at the finding: it shows the address, the robots.txt line that blocks it and up to ten pages that link to it.
  2. If the address should be found in search, remove or narrow the blocking line.
  3. If it should not be, remove the links, and keep it out of search with noindex on a crawlable page or with a password, not with robots.txt alone.

When to leave it as it is: if the address is a cart, search or account page you block on purpose and visitors need the links, you can leave it.

What we read

We read robots.txt, up to its first 512,000 bytes, and the <a href> and <area href> links in each crawled page's HTML as served, resolved against a <base href>. Links inside <template>, <noscript> or an iframe are skipped, and this rule makes no additional request to the linked address.

An address is reported when a link points to it on the same protocol, host and port as the checked robots.txt and its rules for Googlebot disallow it: the group that names Googlebot most specifically, or *, with the longest match winning and Allow winning a tie. A www. or non-www. twin is another origin, even when both hosts belong to your site. rel="nofollow" does not change the decision for a same-origin link.

When robots.txt answers a 4xx other than 429, such as 404, everything counts as allowed. An unreadable robots.txt, incomplete HTML, for example with unsupported SVG markup, or more than 5,000 links can leave a page unchecked. A link to your site on another scheme, host or port, such as http:// or www., leaves that link's robots.txt decision unknown; a same-origin blocked link on the same page can still be reported, but the page's coverage remains incomplete.

Example & evidence

Illustrative example — one robots.txt line and one link, not a live audit.

https://bakery.example/robots.txt has:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search/

and https://bakery.example/cakes/ links to:

<a href="/search/?q=lemon">Lemon cakes</a>

Googlebot may not crawl /search/?q=lemon, so the address is reported with the line and the page that links to it.

A possible correction: link to /cakes/lemon/ instead.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: compare the linked address's path with the Disallow lines in your robots.txt, or open the address in Search Console's URL Inspection.

Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site. The finding can be confirmed fixed when every page that linked to the address is crawled again, read in full and no longer links to it, or robots.txt now allows it, with conclusive coverage for those pages' relevant links. A former linking page also leaves the required group if it answers directly with a complete non-HTML 200 or starts with a confirmed permanent redirect within your site, provided the rule's execution remains conclusive. A link on one of the remaining pages to another origin of your site can leave the comparison unconfirmed even when a same-origin blocked link was reported before. Adding rel="nofollow" to the links does not close it, and a linking page that cannot be read or is not crawled again leaves it unconfirmed.

Limits & sources

Only the rules for Googlebot are checked, and only links in the HTML as served count. This rule makes no additional request to the linked address, so nothing shows that it exists or is indexed, and crawl budget is not measured.

Confidence: High because both the links and the robots.txt rule are read directly.

Sources

  • Google, Introduction to robots.txt — says robots.txt is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google, that a disallowed URL can still be indexed if linked from other places, and then appears without a description. Checked 28 September 2026.

Editorial review: 29 September 2026