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
-
Website URL, Robots.txt and Google Search Console (www. vs non www.)
Hi MOZ Community,
Technical SEO | | Badiuzz
I would like to request your kind assistance on domain URLs - www. VS non www. Recently, my team have moved to a new website where a 301 Redirection has been done. Original URL : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) New URL : https://example.com.my/ (without www.) Our current robots.txt sitemap : https://www.example.com.my/sitemap.xml (with www.)
Our Google Search Console property : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) Question:
1. How/Should I standardize these so that Google crawler can effectively crawl my website?
2. Do I have to change back my website URLs to (with www.) or I just need to update my robots.txt?
3. How can I update my Google Search Console property to reflect accordingly (without www.), because I cannot see the options in the dashboard.
4. Is there any to dos such as Canonicalization needed, or should I wait for Google to automatically detect and change it, especially in GSC property? Really appreciate your kind assistance. Thank you,
Badiuzz0 -
Bloking pages in roborts.txt that are under a redirected subdomain
Hi Everyone, I have a lot of Marketo landing pages that I don't want to show in SERP. Adding the noindex meta tag for each page will be too much, I have thousands of pages. Blocking it in roborts.txt could have been an option, BUT, the subdomain homepage is redirected to my main domain (with a 302) so I may confuse search engines ( should they follow the redirect or should they block) marketo.mydomain.com is redirected to www.mydomain.com disallow: / (I think this will be confusing with the redirect) I don't have folders, all pages are under the subdomain, so I can't block folders in Robots.txt also Would anyone had this scenario or any suggestions? I appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Google Webmaster Tools is saying "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt" after Https move...
Hi Everyone, I really don't see anything wrong with our robots.txt file after our https move that just happened, but Google says all URLs are blocked. The only change I know we need to make is changing the sitemap url to https. Anything you all see wrong with this robots.txt file? robots.txt This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo! and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site, you save bandwidth and server resources. This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host: Used: http://example.com/robots.txt Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html For syntax checking, see: http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html Website Sitemap Sitemap: http://www.bestpricenutrition.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: * Allowable Index Allow: /*?p=
Technical SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /aitmanufacturers/index/view/
Disallow: /blog/tag/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/abuse/reportajax/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/ajaxproduct/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/proscons/checkbyproscons/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: /productquestions/index/ajaxform/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt Paths (no clean URLs) Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
disallow: /?cat=
disallow: /?price=
disallow: /?flavor=
disallow: /?dir=
disallow: /?mode=
disallow: /?list=
disallow: /?limit=5
disallow: /?limit=10
disallow: /?limit=15
disallow: /?limit=20
disallow: /*?limit=250 -
How can I make it so that robots.txt is not ignored due to a URL re-direct?
Recently a site moved from blog.site.com to site.com/blog with an instruction like this one: /etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:94: ProxyPass /blog http://blog.site.com
Technical SEO | | rodelmo4
/etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:95: ProxyPassReverse /blog http://blog.site.com It's a Wordpress.org blog that was set as a subdomain, and now is being redirected to look like a directory. That said, the robots.txt file seems to be ignored by Google bot. There is a Disallow: /tag/ on that file to avoid "duplicate content" on the site. I have tried this before with other Wordpress subdomains and works like a charm, except for this time, in which the blog is rendered as a subdirectory. Any ideas why? Thanks!0 -
How to use robots.txt to block areas on page?
Hi, Across the categories/product pages on out site there are archives/shipping info section and the texts are always the same. Would this be treated as duplicated content and harmful for seo? How can I alter robots.txt to tell google not to crawl those particular text Thanks for any advice!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Confirming Robots.txt code deep Directories
Just want to make sure I understand exactly what I am doing If I place this in my Robots.txt Disallow: /root/this/that By doing this I want to make sure that I am ONLY blocking the directory /that/ and anything in front of that. I want to make sure that /root/this/ still stays in the index, its just the that directory I want gone. Am I correct in understanding this?
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
What can I do if Google Webmaster Tools doesn't recognize the robots.txt file?
I'm working on a recently hacked site for a client and and in trying to identify how exactly the hack is running I need to use the fetch as Google bot feature in GWT. I'd love to use this but it thinks the robots.txt is blocking it's acces but the only thing in the robots.txt file is a link to the sitemap. Unde the Blocked URLs section of the GWT it shows that the robots.txt was last downloaded yesterday but it's incorrect information. Is there a way to force Google to look again?
Technical SEO | | DotCar0 -
What are your thoughts on security of placing CMS-related folders in a robots.txt file?
So I was just about to add a whole heap of CMS-related folders to my robots.txt file to exclude them from search, and thought "hey, I'm publicly telling people where my admin folders are"...surely that's not right?! Should I leave them out of the robots.txt file, and hope for the best that they never get indexed? Should I use noindex meta data on every page? What are people's thoughts? Thanks, James PS. I know this is similar to lots of other discussions around meta noindex vs. robots.txt, but I'm after specific thoughts around the security aspect of listing your admin folders in a robots.txt file...
Technical SEO | | James-Distinction0
