Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
-
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like:
staging.domain.com
User-agent: *
Disallow: /in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.
-
Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked.
-
I agree. The name of your subdomain being "staging" didn't register at all with me until Matt brought it up. I was offering a generic response to the subdomain question whereas I believe Matt focused on how to handle a staging site. Interesting viewpoint.
-
Matt/Ryan-
Great discussion, thanks for the input. The staging.domain.com is just one of the domains we don't want indexed. Some of them still need to be accessed by the public, some like staging could be restricted to specific IPs.
I realize after your discussion I probably should have used a different example of a sub-domain. On the other hand it might not have sparked the discussion so maybe it was a good example
-
.htaccess files can be placed at any directory level of a site so you can do it for just the subdomain or even just a directory of a domain.
-
Staging URL's are typically only used for testing so rather than do a deny I would recommend using a specific ALLOW for only the IP addresses that should be allowed access.
I would imagine you don't want it indexed because you don't want the rest of the world knowing about it.
You can also use HTACCESS to use username/passwords. It is simple but you can give that to clients if that is a concern/need.
-
Correct.
-
Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.
The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.
-
Hi Matt.
Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.
-
Interesting, hadn't thought of using htaccess to block Googlebot.Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Thanks Ryan. So you don't see any issues with de-indexing the main site if I created a second robots.txt file, e.g.
http://staging.domin.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /That was my initial thought but when Google announced they consider sub-domains part of the TLD I was afraid it might affect the htp://www.domain.com versions of the pages. So you're saying the subdomain is basically treated like a folder you block on the primary domain?
-
Use an .htaccess file to only allow from certain ip addresses or ranges.
Here is an article describing how: http://www.kirupa.com/html5/htaccess_tricks.htm
-
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Place a robots.txt file in the root of the subdomain.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /This method will block the subdomain while leaving your primary domain unaffected.
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
-
Unsolved Why My site pages getting video index viewport issue?
Hello, I have been publishing a good number of blogs on my site Flooring Flow. Though, there's been an error of the video viewport on some of my articles. I have tried fixing it but the error is still showing in Google Search Console. Can anyone help me fix it out?
Technical SEO | | mitty270 -
How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?
We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg
Technical SEO | | jasny0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
Image Height/Width attributes, how important are they and should a best practice site include this as std
Hi How important are the image height/width attributes and would you expect a best practice site to have them included ? I hear not having them can slow down a page load time is that correct ? Any other issues from not having them ? I know some re social sharing (i know bufferapp prefers images with h/w attributes to draw into their selection of image options when you post) Most importantly though would you expect them to be intrinsic to sites that have been designed according to best practice guidelines ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is Google caching date same as crawling/indexing date?
If a site is cached on say 9 oct 2012 doesn't that also mean that Google crawled it on same date ? And indexed it on same date?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0