How to prevent directory from being accessed by search engines?
-
Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.
-
But don't forget to remove that Disallow out of Robots.txt when you go live - if you want those pages to be indexed (and also the Meta-robots noindex nofollow).
Otherwise you might be pulling your hair out trying to figure out why none of your pages are getting indexed in the SERPs.
-
You're absolutely right! I left that part out. Thanks
-
The robots.txt file does not guarantee that your pages will not show up in search results! Your best bet after password protection is adding a NoIndex meta tag to you page headers.
Google have openly said that they obey this tag (Matt Cutts).
-
Xee,
It always help, and it is very easy to implement. This function to show the path to the sitemap ir very good.
-
It's not required to have the ending slash. At least, it works for us without it.
-
As it is, my site is just phpBB3 forums (www.bearsfansonline.com); would a sitemap really help that much?
-
If you don't have an robot.txt file, you need to include some important stuff first.
First, do you have a sitemap.xlm for your website? If not, its very important and you should creat it at: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Create a robot.txt file and include the follow:
User-agent: * allow: / disallow: /directoryname
Sitemap: http://www.yousite.com/sitemap.xmlWith this you will inform all robots where is your sitemap. You should read more about robots.txt in this great post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
-
shouldn't you put a slash at the end of the directory in the robots file?
you can create the robots file through the Google Webmaster Tools
-
I don't have a robots.txt file in my root. Do I just create a text file, put the above lines into it, and upload it to my root after changing the name?
-
I'm assuming you want all search engines blocked from this directory. If so, edit your robots.txt file to state the following. This will block all bots from accessing a folder/directory on your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directoryname
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
-
Google Search Console Not Sending Messages
One of our sites received a Manual Penalty for unnatural links by Google. However, we never received a message in Google Search Console or an email about the manual action. The only reason we knew about the penalty is by the obvious drop in rankings, then signing into search console to look for any manual actions, which we found. Since then, we have submitted a disavow file and a reconsideration request. However, once again we did not receive an email or message in search console that shows confirmation of the disavow or that they received the reconsideration request. The disavow file does show up after I upload it, and it says it was successfully uploaded... but no messages or emails. After many hours of investigating the various canonical versions of our website on Search Console, we found out that there were several “owners” of the various canonical versions of our site that had “could not find the email address” as a site owner. We found out that these were previous employees who no longer worked with the company and their email address was deleted. After unverifying these site owners, (all the ones that had “could not find the email address” as the site owner), the notifications, emails and messages in Search Console started to appear. However, the only place they did not appear, is the main canonical version of our site. Of course, the main canonical version of our site (https://www) is the version that we uploaded the disavow and reconsideration request. This is the canonical version of the site that we need to receive these messages to know if our reconsideration request was granted! We’ve just reuploaded the disavow file and reconsideration request to all of the other canonical versions (2 of the 3 received the message about the penalty)…. and we are currently awaiting a response. Has anybody else had problems with not receiving notifications in search console due to deleted email addresses?
Technical SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
How to handle Friendly URLs together with internal filters search?
I've been trying to handle URLs from a unfrendly folder format to a semantic one, the thing is by doing so I end up with a longer URL and therefore a longer Title. Right now the format of my classified site for job seeking looks like this (folders): site.com/search/category/sales/level/supervisor/location/seattle/company/acme/published/2-days-ago/type/full-time/q/salesman/page/2 format: Filter/Content where at the end q is the query people are writting My suggestion is the following: Mixing Jobs with location, mixing category and level, and puting the rest of the filters at the end adding "--" between them. And adding 2 parameters, query (q) and pagination (pag) site.com/jobs-at-seattle/sales-supervisor/company/acme/full-time--published-2-days-ago?q=salesman&pag=2 Any thoughts on how to handle URLs over 100 chararcters and titles that go over 65?, or maybe is ok to have "friendly" long URLs and long titles when it comes to classified ad sites since they are based on internal filters to help people find what they are looking for. Sidenote: Is itok to have 2 parameters in the URL (Query and Pagination) Thanks a lot.
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
International Targeting - Google Search Console not recognizing the tags
Hi, We are facing a problem with international targeting not being recognized by the Google Search Console. This is the URL to which we added the following tags: URL: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015-100/help-en/index.html TAGS: Flang tool Result: http://screencast.com/t/rrBgcr1X Search Console result: http://screencast.com/t/fP45ZR2c I am a bit lost here, as the tags were validated also from different members of the community. Is this because of the frames? (Yes, the site is built in frames). Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Changes to title and description not appearing in Google search...
www.heatwavemedia.com Search terms: san francisco video production, san francisco video production services In Google search site appears as "Heartwave Media: San Francisco Video Production Services" but I'm sure I've never used a colon in all my iterations of the title... Instead it reads "San Francisco Video Production Services | Heartwave Media" with the description "A San Francisco video production company specializing in creative corporate and commercial video services." But that's not coming up either... I'm on Wordpress and am using All in One SEO if that helps... Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | keeot0 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Incorrect name on search result
Hi, While auditing the website for a new client that i inherited just noticed that when i search for 'hyundai roswell georgia' on Google the dealership name appearing on Google search result is incorrect. The name of the business is Rick Case Hyundai. However, it appears as Rick Case Honda(see attached screenshot). Any recommendation on how to fix this and why is this happening? Regards Neil azJCR.png
Technical SEO | | neildomain0 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
Authorship and picture in search results
Tim and Kris Hallbom at this site: nlpca(dot)com are authors of several books and many great articles, and they would like their picture to show up in their search results. Articlebase.com contacted us and called it authorship, and said that they could get our picture to begin showing up in appropriate google searches. But we don't want to go through Articlebase.com, how do we do this? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0