The use of robots.txt
-
-
Thank you Martijn. It helps indeed.
-
Hi Daniela,
I can confirm that it won't be any problem if you don't have a robots.txt file if you don't want to block any pages. For myself I find it more useful to still have a robots.txt file in there which allows search engines to crawl the complete site. But that's just my personal opinion.
Hope this helps!
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
-
What do you use to come up with content ideas?
Buzzsumo charge and not sure it's worth it. didn't find Quora helpful. Any others?
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine2 -
Do robot.txts permanently affect websites even after they have been removed?
A client has a Wordpress blog to sit alongside their company website. They kept it hidden whilst they were developing what it looked like, keeping it un-searchable by Search Engines. It was still live, but Wordpress put a robots.txt in place. When they were ready they removed the robots.txt by clicking the "allow Search Engines to crawl this site" button. It took a month and a half for their blog to show in Search Engines once the robot.txt was removed. Google is now recognising the site (as a "site:" test has shown) however, it doesn't rank well for anything. This is despite the fact they are targeting keywords with very little organic competition. My question is - could the fact that they developed the site behind a robot.txt (rather than offline) mean the site is permanently affected by the robot.txt in the eyes of the Search Engines, even after that robot.txt has been removed? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on the situation.
Technical SEO | | Driver720 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Have I constructed my robots.txt file correctly for sitemap autodiscovery?
Hi, Here is my sitemap: User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.bedsite.co.uk/sitemaps/sitemap.xml Directories Disallow: /sendfriend/
Technical SEO | | Bedsite
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /media/catalog/product/cache/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /categories/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/result/index/
Disallow: /links.html I'm using Magento and want to make sure I have constructed my robots.txt file correctly with the sitemap autodiscovery? thanks,0 -
Is having no robots.txt file the same as having one and allowing all agents?
The site I am working on currently has no robots.txt file. However, I have just uploaded a sitemap and would like to point the robots.txt file to it. Once I upload the robots.txt file, if I allow access to all agents, is this the same as when the site had no robots.txt file at all; do I need to specify crawler access on can the robots.txt file just contain the link to the sitemap?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin. Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this? Here's original message Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure. If the site error rate is less than 100%: Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Robots.txt not working?
Hello This is my robots.txt file http://www.theprinterdepo.com/Robots.txt However I have 8000 warnings on my dashboard like this:4 What am I missing on the file¿ Crawl Diagnostics Report On-Page Properties <dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> </dl> URL: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/100/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVwcmludGVyZGVwby5jb20vaHAtbWFpbnRlbmFjZS1raXQtZm9yLTQtbGo0LWxqNS1mb3ItZXhjaGFuZ2UtcmVmdWJpc2hlZA,,/ 0 Errors No errors found! 1 Warning 302 (Temporary Redirect) Found about 5 hours ago <a class="more">Read More</a>
Technical SEO | | levalencia10