Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multiple robots.txt files on server
-
Hi!
I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step.
One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names:
robots.txt (original dupplicate)
robots.txt-Original (original)
robots.txt-NEW (other content)
robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate)Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!
-
So what's the best policy if a site uses an e-commerce platform like Magento, which has a robots file, but also has a Wordpress blog installed to another folder. eg: /blog and uses a plugin like YOAST which generated a robots file of the Wordpress installation.
Then you have 2 robots files, is this detrimental or no big deal?
-
Thanks very much for the help!
-
Thanks very much for the help!
-
Keep a backup and remove them.
Search engines are only going to look at the file which is exactly called robots.txt variations of file name will be ignored.
Do make sure the entries are correct in the main one though, you don't want Google crawling admin pages or other confidential areas of the site.
-
Hi, thanks for the answer and help!
Well, I only have one domain that has a webpage and no subdomains active (no blog-subdomain or similar) - so how can I configure that to the situation? Can I just remove all and upload the one I want, maybe?
-
That's a good question, EMS. The robots.txt protocol can get kind of
confusing when you think about it too long, and it sounds like you've
thought about this a bit. However, in this case, it might help to
look at robots.txt from the perspective of the spider.When a spider finds a URL, it takes the whole domain name (everything
between 'http://' and the next '/'), then sticks a '/robots.txt' on
the end of it and looks for that file. If that file exists, then the
spider should read it to see where it is allowed to crawl.In your case, Googlebot, or any other spider, should try to access
three URLs: domainA.com/robots.txt, domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt,
and domainB.com/robots.txt. The rules in each are treated as
separate, so disallowing robots from domainA.com/ should result in
domainA.com/ being removed from search results while
domainB.domainA.com/ remains unaffected, which does not sound like not
something you want.The problem you might have with the setup you have described is this--
in order to keep domainB.domainA.com out of the results, you would
need to have domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt exclude robots, while
domainB.com/robots.txt welcomes them. This means that you would need
to have a way to make domainB.domainA.com/ and domainB.com/ serve
different information, and judging from what you've described, you
have not set up your server to do so yet.Of course, it is always possible that I have assumed to much about
your situation, so it is a good idea to use Google's robots.txt
analysis tool (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8475
) to see if your robots.txt files already produce the results you
want.If using robots.txt files doesn't solve the problem, and assuming that
you want to continue hosting all of your content on domainA.com, one
strategy you really should look into would be setting up a 301
redirect from the pages on domainB.domainA.com/ to domainB.com/ . If
you need more advice on how to do this with your server software, your
hosting company's tech support would definitely be the best place to
start, but this group is here to help if more isues arise.Hope that 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
-
Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
2 sitemaps on my robots.txt?
Hi, I thought that I just could link one sitemap from my site's robots.txt but... I may be wrong. So, I need to confirm if this kind of implementation is right or wrong: robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise ...
Technical SEO | | Webicultors
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.es/media/sitemap/es.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.pt/media/sitemap/pt.xml Thanks in advance,0 -
Is it important to include image files in your sitemap?
I run an ecommerce business that has over 4000 product pages which, as you can imagine, branches off into thousands of image files. Is it necessary to include those in my sitemap for faster indexing? Thanks for you help! -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Adding multi-language sitemaps to robots.txt
I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento. Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language. The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts. They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as: /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it. Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language: /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Multiple urls for posting multiple classified ads
Want to optimize referral traffic while at same time keep search engines happy and the ads posted. Have a client who advertises on several classified ad sites around the globe. Which is better (post Panda), having multiple identical urls using canonicals to redirect juice to original url? For example: www.bluewidgets.com is the original www.bluewidgetsusa.com www.blue-widgets-galore.com Or, should the duplicate pages be directed to original using a 301? Currently using duplicate urls. Am currently not using "nofollow" tags on those pages.
Technical SEO | | AllIsWell0 -
Adding Rel Canonical to multiple pages
Hi, Our CMS generates a lot of duplicate content, (Different versions of every page for 3 different font sizes). There are many other reasons why we should drop this current CMS and go with something else, and we are in the process of doing that. But for now, does anyone know how would I do the following: I've created a spreadsheet that contains the following: Column 1: rel="canonical" tag for URL Column 2: Duplicate Content URL # 1 Column 3: Duplicate Content URL # 2 Column 4: Duplicate Content URL # 3 I want to add the tag from column 1 into the head of every page from column 2,3, and 4. What would be a fast way to do this considering that I have around 1800 rows. Check the screenshot of the builtwith.com result to see more information about the website if that helps. Farris bxySL
Technical SEO | | jdossetti0 -
On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?
We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
.htacess file format for Apache Server
Hi, My website having canonical issue for home page, I have written the .htaccess file and upload the root directory. But still I didn't see any changes in the home page. I am copying syntax which one I have written in the .htaccess file. Please review the syntax and let me know the changes. Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on #RewriteBase / re-direct index.htm to root / ### RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L] re-direct IP address to www ### re-direct non-www to www ### re-direct any parked domain to www of main domain RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.metricstream.com$ [nc] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.metricstream.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L] Is there any specific htaccess file format for apache server? Thanks, Karthik
Technical SEO | | karthik-1755440