How to use wildcards to remove print pages from search engines?

Question

Our site has pages that are print-friendly, which I would like to remove from search engines.

Here's an example: http://rubinarealestate.com/en/property/apartments-charming-neighborhood/?pid=4940&print=1 is the print-version of http://rubinarealestate.com/en/property/apartments-charming-neighborhood/

I assume this can be done with robots.txt and wildcards, as the ?pid=4940&print=1 is always at the end of the URL.

Answer 1

This is as easy as including this disallow rule in your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /*print=1

That will only work for bots that actually support wildcards in robots.txt. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all do, but minor search engines may not.

You could also configure your server to include a meta robots noindex directive in the print version of the page:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">