Robots.txt Blocking - Best Practices
-
Hi All,
We have a web provider who's not willing to remove the wildcard line of code blocking all agents from crawling our client's site (user-agent: *, Disallow: /). They have other lines allowing certain bots to crawl the site but we're wondering if they're missing out on organic traffic by having this main blocking line. It's also a pain because we're unable to set up Moz Pro, potentially because of this first line.
We've researched and haven't found a ton of best practices regarding blocking all bots, then allowing certain ones. What do you think is a best practice for these files?
Thanks!
User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: Crawl-delay: 5 User-agent: Yahoo-slurp Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /new_vehicle_detail.asp Disallow: /new_vehicle_compare.asp Disallow: /news_article.asp Disallow: /new_model_detail_print.asp Disallow: /used_bikes/ Disallow: /default.asp?page=xCompareModels Disallow: /fiche_section_detail.asp
-
Thanks for taking the time to respond in depth, GreenStone. We appreciate the advice and have passed your response along to the web hosting company (along with a frustrated email) explaining they're not adhering to anyone's best practices. Hopefully this will convince them!
-
Thanks, Dmitrii for your response! From our research we've seen similar recommendations and it helps to have more evidence to back it up. Hopefully these guys will give in a bit!
-
Completely agree, I really wouldn't want to host my stuff with a company that can't figure out what really the best practices are ;-). This is very well layed out why you shouldn't want to set up your robots.txt like it is right now.
-
In general, I definitely wouldn't recommend the way the web-provider is handling this.
- Disallowing all while adding exceptions should never be the norm. Allowing all to crawl while adding exceptions for other crawlers aside from google would be best practice generally,
- It makes a lot more sense to just allow crawlers full access, and then add crawl delays for non google crawlers, in addition to disallowing those specific sub-folders: Disallow: /new_vehicle_detail.asp Disallow: /new_vehicle_compare.asp Disallow: /news_article.asp Disallow: /new_model_detail_print.asp Disallow: /used_bikes/ Disallow: /default.asp?page=xCompareModels Disallow: /fiche_section_detail.asp.
- Googlebot Disallow: Crawl-delay: 5, does not do you any good, as google does not obey these commands. Only Search Console can control this.
- You can test what is visible to googlebot within search console's "robots" subsection, in order to verify what they can access.
- Disallowing all while adding exceptions should never be the norm. Allowing all to crawl while adding exceptions for other crawlers aside from google would be best practice generally,
-
Here is another video from Matt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2giR-WKUfY
Lots of good points there too.
-
Hi.
Super weird client - that's for sure.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Every bot will be blocked off! how in the world are they ranking?
watch that video, there are good ideas of bot and crawlers controlling. As well as you can consider that as best practices. And yes, what they have now is ridiculous.
https://moz.com/community/q/should-we-use-google-s-crawl-delay-setting
Here is a q/a about crawler delays. As far as I know Google ignores delays anyway, plus there is nothing good about it anyway.
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
-
Set Robots.txt file to crawl my website at specific times
Our website provider has stated that they can only 'lift' their block on our website in order for it to be crawled as specific times. Is there any way to amend a robots.txt to ensure that it crawls our website at a specific time of day/night in order to coincide with the block being lifted? Many Thanks, Charlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharleneKennedy120 -
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 -
What is Best Way to Scale RCS Content?
SEO has really moved away from the nitty gritty analysis of backlinking factors, link wheels, and the like and has shifted to a more holistic marketing approach. That approach is best described around MOZ as “Real Company S#it”. RCS is a great way to think about what we really do because it is so much more than just SEO or just Social Media. However, our clients and business owners do want to see results and want it quantified in some way. The way most of our clients understand SEO is by ranking high on specific terms or online avenues they have a better possibility of generating traffic/sales/revenue. They understand this more from the light of traditional marketing, where you pay for a TV ad and then measure to see how much revenue that ad generated. In the light of RCS and the need to target a large number of keywords for a given client, how do most PROs handle this situation; where you have a large number of keywords to target but with RCS? Many I’ve asked tend to use the traditional approach of creating a single content piece that is geared towards a given target keyword. However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target. In this case is not really a case of scaling down the client expectations? What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget? Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts? It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
What are the best ways to fix 404 errors?
I recently changed the url of my main blog and now have about 100 404 errors. I did a redirect from the old url to the new one however still have errors. 1. Should I do a 301 redirect from each old blog post url to the new blog post url? 2. Should I just delete the old blog post (url) and rewrite the blog post? I"m not concerned about links to the old posts as a lot of them do not have many links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Best url structure
I am making a new site for a company that services many cities. I was thinking a url structure like this, website.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/cityname1-cityname2-cityname3-cityname4-cityname5. Will this be the best approach to optimize the site for the keyword plus 5 different cities ? as long as I keep the total url characters under the SeoMoz reccomended 115 characters ? Or would it be better to build separate pages for each city, trying to reword the main services to try to avoid dulpicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Effect duration of robots.txt file.
in my web site there is demo site in that also, index in Google but no need it now.so i have created robots file and upload to server yesterday.in the demo folder there are some html files,and i wanna remove all these in demo file from Google.but still in web master tools it showing User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity
Disallow: /demo/ How long this will take to remove from Google ? And are there any alternative way doing that ?0 -
Zip Code Blocks the Search Engines!
I have a site where when you visit the product pages, it asks for your zip code. This is obviously blocking the bots from crawling the site. I know you can basically tell the bots how to ignore the zip code feature but I am not exactly sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhawk0 -
Should I robots block this directory?
There's about 43k pages indexed in this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines. Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory? ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0