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.
-
Sort of resolved, maybe the wrong place to ask any further. The above is a working fix for what seems like a legit bug, I'll update if WordPress forums say anything.
-
No, I don't like to waste memory and bandwidth. If you can do it yourself, you should probably do it yourself. I'm moving this question to WordPress.
-
Hi Ethan
One thing I have heard of people trying is a plugin that serves dynamic robots.txt files. I don't use add-on sites so you will probably have to test the behavior. He is an example of one of the plugins.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
hope this helps,
Anthony -
Ethan
It sounds like the issue has been resolved. I'm not too familiar with domain add-ons but if you have any more trouble let us know and I'll be sure another Moz Associate takes a look.
-Dan (Moz Associate)
-
-
Hi Ethan
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was thinking you could drop the use of the robots.txt all together and just use the Meta Tag approach since it seems that the robots.txt is having a global impact to your sites. Search engines will still crawl the pages, but it should exclude them from the index.
Hope this helps,
Anthony -
Anthony, based on your response it's obvious you haven't read the question or follow-up.
-
Hi Ethan
One approach may be to try using the Robots Meta Tag. You can use noindex to tell Google not to index. This won't prevent crawling, but Google should respect the request to not index your site. I have included a good guide below to get you started.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag
Hope this helps,
Anthony B
Biondo Creative
biondocreative.com -
I've found a quick fix for now: http://ethanglover.biz/using-robots-txt-with-addon-domains/
This is still an issue, and it may be exclusive to WordPress.
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
-
Adding your sitemap to robots.txt
Hi everyone, Best practice question: When adding your sitemap to your robots.txt file, do you add the whole sitemap at once or do you add different subcategories (products, posts, categories,..) separately? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
Blog.domain or domain.com/blog
My client can't do domain.com/blog because he's on wix. I'm thinking blog.domain.com. Do you have any resources for the pros and cons of this? I understand that google looks at them very similarly now, is that true for google +?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Domain Migration Information
Hi, We are in the process of switching from *.net to *.com and I am looking for some resources on this. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Block Baidu crawler?
Hello! One of our websites receives a large amount of traffic from the Baidu crawler. We do not have any Chinese content or do any business with China since our market is Uk. Is it a good idea to block the Baidu crawler in the robots.txt or could it have any adverse effects on SEO of our site? What do you suggest?
Technical SEO | | AJPro0 -
Restricted by robots.txt does this cause problems?
I have restricted around 1,500 links which are links to retailers website and links that affiliate links accorsing to webmaster tools Is this the right approach as I thought it would affect the link juice? or should I take the no follow out of the restricted by robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt
Hi folks, No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!? To repeat: If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link? Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page? I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?
Technical SEO | | DaveSottimano0 -
Redirecting a domain
I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot. "We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing. What would you suggest doing given the error message above. Thanks, Bill Sqnch.jpg
Technical SEO | | Marvo0 -
Subdomain Robots.txt
If I have a subdomain (a blog) that is having tags and categories indexed when they should not be, because they are creating duplicate content. Can I block them using a robots.txt file? Can I/do I need to have a separate robots file for my subdomain? If so, how would I format it? Do I need to specify that it is a subdomain robots file, or will the search engines automatically pick this up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnECF0