Confused about robots.txt
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There is a lot of conflicting and/or unclear information about robots.txt out there. Somehow, I can't make out what's the best way to use robots even after visiting the official robots website. For example I have the following format for my robots.
User-agent: * Disallow: javascript.js Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /embedconfig Disallow: /playerconfig Disallow: /spotlightmedia Disallow: /EventVideos Disallow: /playEpisode Allow: / Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex-videos.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/news-sitemap.xmlIs this correct and/or recommended? If so, then how come I see a list of over 200 or so links blocked by robots when Im checking out Google Webmaster Tools!
Help someone, anyone! Can't seem to understand this robotic business!
Regards,
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Google may still index pages excluded by robots.txt if the pages are backlinked either internally or externally.
For best results, use meta noindex to tell search engines they're not allowed to show the link in results, and meta nofollow to tell robots not to follow any links on the page.
Webmaster Tools Help: Using meta tags to block access to your site
You can also explicitly address goooglebot in the meta tag, as opposed to just robots. If you use both a robots.txt and meta robots tags and there are conflicting directives, googlebot will follow the most restrictive one.
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I would also recommend to go to the site configuration - crawler access page in Google Webmaster and test many of your sites URL's to ensure that robots can access them. Test every unique URL format on your site like the search results page, product pages, category pages, etc... I always use this tool whenever I make any change in the robots.txt
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Hi,
Allow: / isn't valid syntax in a robots.txt file, Anything that isn't disallowed is allowed by default.
Other than that all looks good. Perhaps the 200 or so links to blocked pages were indexed before the robots.txt was last updated with the disallows?
Regards
Aran
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