## 🗺️ 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.