Is it terrible to not have robots.txt ?
-
I was under the impression that you really should have a robots.txt page, and not having one is pretty bad. However, hubspot (which I'm not impressed with) does not have the capability of properly implementing one. Will this hurt the site?
-
Thank you everyone! Great stuff
-
And for reference, this Search Engine Land column from 2009 provides a pretty concise treatment of how to utilize our friend the robots exclusion protocol: A Deeper Look At Robots.txt
-
Hi Jaycie,
Google's view of the issue is that you should have a robots.txt file in order to eliminate the risk of your web host dealing with requests in an unexpected way and returning something strange.
Matt Cutts talked about robots.txt in this Webmaster Help Video last month.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Technically you don't need one.
However, It is so easy to put one in place (usually) and I would consider it a best practice. Like developing an application without taking notes on implementation. What happens when someone new comes along to work with it. They will ask the same question. Not having one and deliberately allowing the robots to crawl all are two inherently different things.
-
It won't hurt the site. You only need one if you want to disallow parts of your site to search engines, or disallow different search bots. If you don't have any pages or directories to disallow, I wouldn't worry about it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Google is Still Blocking Pages Unblocked 1 Month ago in Robots
I manage a large site over 200K indexed pages. We recently added a new vertical to the site that was 20K pages. We initially blocked the pages using Robots.txt while we were developing/testing. We unblocked the pages 1 month ago. The pages are still not indexed at this point. 1 page will show up in the index with an omitted results link. Upon clicking the link you can see the remaining un-indexed pages. Looking for some suggestions. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Tyler1230 -
Robots.txt Download vs Cache
We made an update to the Robots.txt file this morning after the initial download of the robots.txt file. I then submitted the page through Fetch as Google bot to get the changes in asap. The cache time stamp on the page now shows Sep 27, 2013 15:35:28 GMT. I believe that would put the cache time stamp at about 6 hours ago. However the Blocked URLs tab in Google WMT shows the robots.txt last downloaded at 14 hours ago - and therefore it's showing the old file. This leads me to believe for the Robots.txt the cache date and the download time are independent. Is there anyway to get Google to recognize the new file other than waiting this out??
Technical SEO | | Rich_A0 -
Robots.txt issue - site resubmission needed?
We recently had an issue when a load of new files were transferred from our dev server to the live site, which unfortunately included the dev site's robots.txt file which had a disallow:/ instruction. Bad! Luckily I spotted it quickly and the file has been replaced. The extent of the damage seems to be that some descriptions aren't displaying and we're getting a message about robots.txt in the SERPs for a few keywords. I've done a site: search and generally it seems to be OK for 99% of our pages. Our positions don't seem to be affected right now but obviously it's not great for the CTRs on those keywords affected. My question is whether there is anything I can do to bring the updated robots.txt file to Google's attention? Or should we just wait and sit it out? Thanks in advance for your answers!
Technical SEO | | GBC0 -
Robots.txt question
What is this robots.txt telling the search engines? User-agent: * Disallow: /stats/
Technical SEO | | DenverKelly0 -
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls. So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*? To prevent the price faceted url from being cached: /category.html?price=1%2C1000
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88 Thanks!0