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Overview

Not every page on your site needs to be prerendered. Logged-in dashboards, admin panels, account settings and login pages show content that is personal or private, and there’s no reason for search engines or AI crawlers to read them. Blocked paths tell Hado SEO to leave those pages alone. A blocked path is never prerendered, even if it appears in your sitemap.
Blocked paths are available on every plan.

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What blocking a path does

When a page matches one of your blocked paths:
  • Hado SEO doesn’t prerender it. Crawlers that request it get your site’s normal response, the same one they would get without Hado SEO.
  • It doesn’t use renders. Blocked pages are skipped during sitemap syncs and recrawls, so they never count against your plan’s renders.
  • Your visitors aren’t affected. People using your site see exactly what they saw before.
Blocking a path keeps it out of prerendering, but on its own it doesn’t remove the page from search results. To ask search engines not to index a page, turn on noindex for the rule (see Search engine directives below).

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Accessing Blocked Paths

  1. Go to your Dashboard
  2. Select your domain
  3. Click the Blocked Paths tab
The first time you open the tab, a short guide explains the basics. You can show or hide it again with Show Guide.

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Adding a blocked path

  1. Click Add Blocked Path
  2. Enter a path pattern (it must start with /)
  3. Optionally turn on noindex and/or nofollow
  4. Optionally add a note so your team knows why the path is blocked
  5. Click Block Path
Changes take effect within about a minute.

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Path patterns

Matching rules:
  • Exact match: a pattern without /* matches that one page and nothing below it.
  • Wildcard: a pattern ending in /* matches the path itself and everything under it.
  • Not case-sensitive: /Admin and /admin are treated the same.
  • Query strings and trailing slashes are ignored: /pricing/?ref=ad matches /pricing.

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Common examples

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Search engine directives

Each blocked path can also tell search engines how to treat the page: These are sent to crawlers as an X-Robots-Tag header. They never change what your visitors see. Blocked paths always keep their own noindex setting. If you turn on Override noindex on origin in Domain Settings, it doesn’t apply to blocked paths.
If you use the Cloudflare Worker, your Worker serves blocked paths itself and receives these directives in the x-hadoseo-robots response header. The example Worker in that guide already copies it onto your response as X-Robots-Tag.

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Managing blocked paths

From the Blocked Paths tab you can:
  • Search your blocked paths by pattern
  • Edit a rule to change its pattern, directives or note
  • Delete a rule you no longer need, or select several and delete them together
Each pattern can only be added once per domain.

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Blocked paths vs. robots.txt

They solve different problems:
  • Blocked paths control what Hado SEO prerenders. Crawlers can still request the page.
  • robots.txt asks crawlers not to request a page at all. Well-behaved crawlers follow it, but it’s a request, not a lock.
For private pages, block the path, turn on noindex, and keep the pages behind a login. Don’t also disallow them in robots.txt: a crawler that can’t request a page never sees its noindex, so the page can still show up in search results.

Routing Rules

Set up redirects and proxies

Domain Settings

Configure robots.txt, sitemap and locale