Robots.txt | any SEO advantage to having one vs not having one?
-
Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it.
Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?
-
It's good practice, especially if you are operating a CMS that can create accessible URLs that cause duplicate content problems, create "junk" pages, etc. For example: http://www.asos.com/robots.txt
Google dislikes search results pages being indexed, so you can block those off, e.g. http://moz.com/robots.txt
You can disallow the archive.org bot if you don't want old versions of your site appearing in its search engine, and as others have said you can point to your xml sitemap.
It's not a bad resource to have at your disposal for site hygiene / maintenance reasons, but it's not an absolute necessity either.
-
There are actually a couple good reasons but in short, it's "best practice" so it won't hurt by adding it in. It wont take more than a couple minutes.
-
Just good practice. One SEO advantage would be to include a reference to your sitemap within the robots.txt file.
Aside from that, if you want all of your pages crawled and don't have a sitemap (although you should), no need for a robots.txt file.
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
-
Best way to create robots.txt for my website
How I can create robots.txt file for my website guitarcontrol.com ? It is having login and Guitar lessons.
Technical SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/ I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.) However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't. As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority. How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.) Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks. Proof I'm not crazy in attached video. robotstxt_addon_domain.mp4
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt
Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg0 -
What is better for SEO, keeping a current blog or creating a new one?
We are working with a client to build a new website. They are asking if we should keep their existing blog or create a new one. If they keep the current blog, should we move it so we can incorporate it into their new site or keep it as a separate URL? Or, should we build the new site into the current blog––they are using Wordpress, so we would be able to build out the blog to incorporate the new website.
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
Server Vs Authority
Deciding on whether to go for a Sub directory or CC tld structure. So the tradeoff would be one server location (which can affect local rankings if the server is outside the country) VS a better passing of link authority. What factor is more important?
Technical SEO | | Tourman0 -
How many times robots.txt gets visited by crawlers, especially Google?
Hi, Do you know if there's any way to track how often robots.txt file has been crawled? I know we can check when is the latest downloaded from webmaster tool, but I actually want to know if they download every time crawlers visit any page on the site (e.g. hundreds of thousands of times every day), or less. thanks...
Technical SEO | | linklater0 -
SEO for a franchise business
Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises. Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain? If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city Thanks
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Robots.txt
Hi there, My question relates to the robots.txt file. This statement: /*/trackback Would this block domain.com/trackback and domain.com/fred/trackback ? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220