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
-
Does having a sub-domain on a different server affect SEO?
I'm working with a company that has a hard-coded website on the root domain, and then a WordPress blog on a subdomain on a separate server. We're planning on implementing a hub and spoke model for their content, hosting the main hubs on the root domain and the linked articles on the blog. Is having the blog on a different server going to hinder our SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | KaraParlin0 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
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 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0 -
Can hotlinking images from multiple sites be bad for SEO?
Hi, There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person. I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO. The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains. We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs? Thanks, James
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?
I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0