Robots.txt anomaly
-
Hi,
I'm monitoring a site thats had a new design relaunch and new robots.txt added.
Over the period of a week (since launch) webmaster tools has shown a steadily increasing number of blocked urls (now at 14).
In the robots.txt file though theres only 12 lines with the disallow command, could this be occurring because a line in the command could refer to more than one page/url ? They all look like single urls for example:
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themesetc, etc
And is it normal for webmaster tools reporting of robots.txt blocked urls to steadily increase in number over time, as opposed to being identified straight away ?
Thanks in advance for any help/advice/clarity why this may be happening ?
Cheers
Dan
-
many thanks for that Dan !
-
As far as I thought, the important thing is that your feed shows up in feed readers. Can you subscribe to and view your RSS feed in a variety of different feed readers?
Yes, so long as the ? is utilized only in ways in which would result in duplicate content, or content that would not be desirable to crawl, it will have that effect.
-Dan
-
Many Thanks for your comments Dan !
So it doesnt matter that the feeds not going to be crawled, dont we want feeds to be crawled usually?
Blocking anything with a ? is surely good then isnt it since prevents all the dupe content etc one gets from search results ?
Yes my clients webmaster set it up
-
Hi Dan
I see no reason to disallow the feed like that by default, unless there is some reason I don't know about. But it won't harm anything either.
The second part blocks any URL which begins with a ? (question mark). This would block anything that has a parameter in the URL - most commonly a search word, pagination, filtering settings etc.
As far as I'm aware this is not going to be damaging to the site, but it's not the default setting. Did someone set it up that way for you?
My robots.txt shows the default WordPress settings: http://www.evolvingseo.com/robots.txt
-
Hi Dan
Yes please find below, please can you also confirm if the bottom 2 lines refer to blocking internal search results ?:
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: */feedDisallow: /?
Disallow: /*?Many Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan
Can you share the exact line disallowing RSS?
Thanks!
-Dan
-
sorry 1 more question, i see that the webmaster has disallowed the feeds in the robots.txt file is this normal/desirable, i would have thought one would want rss feeds crawled by Google ?
-
nice 1 cheers Jesse !
-
Your assumption is correct. The disallows you listed are directories, not pages. Therefore, anything within the Plugins folder will be disallowed, same with the cache and themes folder.
So you may have multiple files (and I'm sure you do) within each of those folders.
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 in subfolders and hreflang issues
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
Technical SEO | | lauralou82
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt We've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US. They have the following hreflang tags across all pages: We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously). Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all. Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location. Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?0 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
Sub Domains and Robot.txt files...
This is going to seem like a stupid question, and perhaps it is but I am pulling out what little hair I have left. I have a sub level domain on which a website sits. The Main domain has a robots.txt file that disallows all robots. It has been two weeks, I submitted the sitemap through webmaster tools and still, Google has not indexed the sub domain website. My question is, could the robots.txt file on the main domain be affecting the crawlability of the website on the sub domain? I wouldn't have thought so but I can find nothing else. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
A few misc Webmaster tools questions & Robots.txt etc
Hi I have a few general misc questions re Robots.tx & GWT: 1) In the Robots.txt file what do the below lines block, internal search ? Disallow: /?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Disallow: /*? 2) Also the sites feeds are blocked in robots.txt, why would you want to block a sites feeds ? **3) **What's the best way to deal with the below: - old removed page thats returning a 500 response code ? - a soft 404 for an old removed page that has no current replacement old removed pages returning a 404 The old pages didn't have any authority or inbound links hence is it best/ok to simply create a url removal request in GWT ? Cheers Dan0 -
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 -
Block or remove pages using a robots.txt
I want to use robots.txt to prevent googlebot access the specific folder on the server, Please tell me if the syntax below is correct User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /folder/ I want to use robots.txt to prevent google image index the images of my website , Please tell me if the syntax below is correct User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
Technical SEO | | semer0 -
Do I need robots.txt and meta robots?
If I can manage to tell crawlers what I do and don't want them to crawl for my whole site via my robots.txt file, do I still need meta robots instructions?
Technical SEO | | Nola5040 -
Blocking other engines in robots.txt
If your primary target of business is not in China is their any benefit to blocking Chinese search robots in robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Romancing0