The "webmaster" disallowed all ROBOTS to fight spam! Help!!
-
One of the companies I do work for has a magento site. I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly. Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots.
I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website. They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site? Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different?
I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case!
If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones. Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Thanks for the suggestions!! I'll keep you updated.
-
You can get the list of good robots from the list at Robotstxt.org: http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html.
I'd recommend creating an edited version of the robots.txt file yourself, specifically Allowing googlebot and others. Then send that with a link to the robotstxt.org site.
You may need to get the business owners involved. IT exists to enable the business, not strap it down so it can't move.
-
What you could do is just add Allow statements for the different Googlebots and the bots of other search engines. This will probably make the developers happy so they can keep other bots out of the door (although I doubt this would work and definitely don't think that this should be the option to keep spammers away, but that says more about the quality of development ;-)).
-
Yes, there are a ton of bad bots one may want to block. Can you show us the robots.txt file? If they aren't blocking legit search engine bots, you're probably okayish. If they are actually blocking all bots, you have cause for concern.
Can you give us a screenshot from GWT?
I use a program called Screaming Frog daily. It's not malicious, off the shelf. I just want to crawl and gather meta data. I can tell it to disregard robots.txt. It will crawl a site until it hit's something password protected. There's not much any robots.txt can do about it, as it can also spoof user agents.
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
-
Meta robots or robot.txt file?
Hi Mozzers! For parametric URL's would you recommend meta robot or robot.txt file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
For example: http://www.exmaple.com//category/product/cat no./quickView I want to stop indexing /quickView URLs. And what's the real difference between the two? Thanks again! Kay0 -
Your typical blog disclosure. "We received a free product but are not financially compensated".
Good afternoon & Happy Friday! I've ran into the following disclosure multiple times on different blogs. It seems to me like it would be a red flag and counter productive for both the blogger and the brand sending the samples as "free samples" are subject to google link scheming. Am I correct? What are your thoughts on bloggers using this disclaimer in regards to SEO? Disclosure: Some of these products were samples provided to me to try. Opinions and the choice to review are 100% my own! I was not financially compensated for writing this blog post. This post contains affiliate links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
With or without the "www." ?
Is there any benefit whatsoever to having the www. in the URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Should I disallow via robots.txt for my sub folder country TLD's?
Hello, My website is in default English and Spanish as a sub folder TLD. Because of my Joomla platform, Google is listing hundreds of soft 404 links of French, Chinese, German etc. sub TLD's. Again, i never created these country sub folder url's, but Google is crawling them. Is it best to just "Disallow" these sub folder TLD's like the example below, then "mark as fixed" in my crawl errors section in Google Webmaster tools?: User-agent: * Disallow: /de/ Disallow: /fr/ Disallow: /cn/ Thank you, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Robots.txt Question
For our company website faithology.com we are attempting to block out any urls that contain a ? mark to keep google from seeing some pages as duplicates. Our robots.txt is as follows: User-Agent: * Disallow: /*? User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /community/ Is the above correct? We are wanting them to not crawl any url with a "?" inside, however we don't want to harm ourselves in seo. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Please help me with your advice
Hi all, Couple years ago I started to build my business based on EMD domain. The intention was to create the source with the rich unique content. After a year of hard work the site achieved top 10 in Google and started to generate good amount of leads. Then Google announced the EMD Update and site lost the 90% of traffic (after Pandas updates our SERP was steady ) “ a new filter that tries to ensure that low-quality sites don’t rise high in Google’s search results simply because they have search terms in their domain names. ” But I don’t consider my site low-quality site, every page, every post is 100% unique and has been created only to share the knowledge with others… The site has EXCELLENT content from industry point of view.... Since the “ EMD Update “ I read hundreds , hundreds of different articles and opinions related to EMD update and finally I am confused and lost. What should I do… • Kill the site and start new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
• Get more links, but what type of links and how I should get them
• Keep hoping and pray....
• Or do something else Please help me with your advice0 -
Robots.txt disallow subdomain
Hi all, I have a development subdomain, which gets copied to the live domain. Because I don't want this dev domain to get crawled, I'd like to implement a robots.txt for this domain only. The problem is that I don't want this robots.txt to disallow the live domain. Is there a way to create a robots.txt for this development subdomain only? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Partouter0 -
URL rewriting with "-" or with a space ?
Hi Which url should i use for my web site ? and why ? 1 : http://www.test.com/how-are-you.html 2 : http://www.test.com/how are you.html thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nipponx0