🔗 Exclude URL Patterns and Manage Subdomains in SearchAtlas

🗺️ Overview

SearchAtlas gives you precise control over which URLs appear in your dashboards and reports. Using the URL Exclusion conditions feature inside your project's OTTO SEO Settings, you can filter out URLs that are not relevant to your SEO analysis — such as thank-you pages, admin paths, or staging URLs. Additionally, SearchAtlas treats subdomains as separate projects by default, which is important to understand when reviewing your data.

⚙️ Where to Find URL Exclusion Conditions

1. Log in to your SearchAtlas account.
2. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO and open SEO Automation (All Sites view at /seo-automation-v3), then open the project you want to configure.
3. At the top of the project overview, click the Autopilot / Smart Crawl card to open the OTTO SEO Settings modal. You can also reach it from the All Sites table by clicking the Smart Crawl status text on your site's card.
4. Scroll to the URL Exclusion conditions section.
5. Click + Add condition to begin entering your exclusion rules.

✍️ How to Write URL Exclusion Patterns

URL exclusion conditions match URLs with two simple operators: Contains and Start With. When you add a condition, you choose Exclude, then pick the operator and type the text to match — for example /blog/ or ?ref=email. There is no wildcard or regular-expression syntax.

Use the following operators when entering conditions:

• Start With — matches the beginning of the URL path. Use /blog/ to exclude all URLs that begin with /blog/, such as /blog/post-1 and /blog/category/news.
• Contains — matches that text anywhere in the URL. Use ?ref=email to exclude any URL containing that query string parameter, regardless of the path, or /admin/ to exclude any URL that contains /admin/ anywhere in the path.

Conditions are matched against the full URL path and query string. To exclude several different groups of URLs, add one condition per group.

📋 Common Exclusion Pattern Examples

• Start With /cart — Excludes the shopping cart page and anything under it.
• Start With /checkout/ — Excludes all checkout step pages.
• Contains ?sessionid= — Excludes URLs with dynamic session ID parameters.
• Start With /wp-admin/ — Excludes all WordPress admin URLs.
• Contains /print/ — Excludes print-version pages anywhere on the site.
• Contains .jpg — Excludes direct links to image files.

💾 Saving and Applying Your Exclusions

1. Each condition is added with + Add condition — set it to Exclude, choose Contains or Start With, and type the text to match.
2. Repeat for each additional group of URLs you want to exclude.
3. When all conditions are entered, click Update Settings.
4. SearchAtlas will apply your exclusion rules to new data going forward. Historical data already processed may require a new crawl to reflect the updated exclusions.

🌐 How Subdomains Are Handled in SearchAtlas

By default, SearchAtlas treats each subdomain as a separate, independent project. This means that blog.yourdomain.com, shop.yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com are each tracked and reported on individually — they do not share data within the same dashboard unless explicitly configured together.

Key points to understand about subdomain handling:

• Subdomains are not automatically included in a root domain project. You must add each subdomain as its own project if you want to monitor it.
• Google Search Console data is pulled per property. If your GSC property is set to the root domain (domain property), subdomain data may be included. If it is a URL-prefix property, only that specific subdomain or path is covered.
• Backlink and keyword data is scoped to the project URL you define at setup. A project for yourdomain.com will not automatically surface data for shop.yourdomain.com.
• URL exclusion conditions are project-specific. Patterns you configure for one project do not carry over to a subdomain project — you must configure exclusions independently for each.

🔄 Editing or Removing Existing Exclusion Rules

1. Open the relevant project and click the Autopilot / Smart Crawl card to open the OTTO SEO Settings modal.
2. Scroll to URL Exclusion conditions.
3. Find the condition you want to update or remove, and edit or delete it.
4. Click Update Settings to confirm your changes.

💡 Tips for Effective URL Exclusion

• Start broad and refine. Check a condition against a small set of known URLs before adding it to avoid accidentally excluding important pages.
• Exclude paginated URLs with a Contains ?page= condition if pagination creates duplicate content noise in your reports.
• Review your exclusion list periodically as your site structure changes — outdated rules can hide content you now want to track.
• Use exclusions on each project for the most precise control over what SearchAtlas indexes and reports on.

🆘 Need Help?

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.