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.
Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my shop subdomain?
-
Hello Mozzers!
Apologies if this question has been asked before, but I couldn't find an answer so here goes...
Currently I have one robots.txt file hosted at https://www.mysitename.org.uk/robots.txt
We host our shop on a separate subdomain https://shop.mysitename.org.uk
Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my subdomain? (Some Google searches are telling me yes and some no and I've become awfully confused!
-
Thank you. I want to disallow specific URLs on the subdomain and add the shop sitemap in the robots.txt file. So I'll go ahead and create another!
-
You go be fine without one. You only need one if you want to manage that subdmain: add specific xml sitemaps links in robots.txt, cut access to specific folders for that subdomain.
if you don't need any of that - just move forward without one.
-
Currently we just have: User-agent: *
I'm in the process of optimising.
-
It depends what currently is in your robots.txt. Usually it would be useful to have another one for your subdomain.
-
Yes, I would have a seperate robots.txt files.
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
-
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
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 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?
Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Keywords in file names vs folder names
We understand the value of a keyword phrase included in the URL. Is there more value to having that phrase in the folder name of the URL or the file name or does it matter? Example: http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design.php or http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design/ Which is best? Thanks, Wick Smith
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0