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
-
Best use of Canonical Tag with Mini-Websites
Hello, I was wondering what the best way would be to implement Canonical Tags in kind of a unusual situation. The company I work for creates single property websites for real estate agents. We register a URL such as 123MainSt.com - however through DNS we redirect that to a path. For example: http://www.944milmadadr.com would redirect to: https://www.qwikvid.com/realestate/go/v1/home/?idx=wDg1Gdwt7wnQiR3LMeCx28qPnWTKM0JV If we wanted to rank high in the search engines for our clients: "944 Milmada Dr" - Would it be the best practice to Canonical: http://www.944milmadadr.com ? Thanks in advance for any feedback on this!! Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qwikvid0 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
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 -
Is our robots.txt file correct?
Could you please review our robots.txt file and let me know if this is correct. www.faithology.com/robots.txt Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Suggest some best seo extensions for prestashop
Hello all if any one of you using prestashop for their ecommerce portal or for their clients... pelase suggest some good addons of prestashop for the SEO. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idreams0 -
New server update + wrong robots.txt = lost SERP rankings
Over the weekend, we updated our store to a new server. Before the switch, we had a robots.txt file on the new server that disallowed its contents from being indexed (we didn't want duplicate pages from both old and new servers). When we finally made the switch, we somehow forgot to remove that robots.txt file, so the new pages weren't indexed. We quickly put our good robots.txt in place, and we submitted a request for a re-crawl of the site. The problem is that many of our search rankings have changed. We were ranking #2 for some keywords, and now we're not showing up at all. Is there anything we can do? Google Webmaster Tools says that the next crawl could take up to weeks! Any suggestions will be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9Studios0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0