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.
Robots.txt Tester - syntax not understood
-
I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings:
There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these.
XML Sitemaps:
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xmlHow do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings?
Many thanks in advance.
Jim -
I'm to give that a go Martijn.
The text "XML Sitemaps" is in there and flagas as an error. Does this need to be reformatted as well or deleted?
Kind regards,
James. -
Hi James,
The right syntax is:
Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xmlWhen you retry it should show up as working.
Martijn.
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
-
Role of Robots.txt and Search Console parameters settings
Hi, wondering if anyone can point me to resources or explain the difference between these two. If a site has url parameters disallowed in Robots.txt is it redundant to edit settings in Search Console parameters to anything other than "Let Googlebot Decide"?
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?1 -
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
Hi, I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt? That's my situation: 1 multilang platform which means... ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss? Thanks in advance, Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
Technical SEO | | Webicultors0 -
Sizes and numbers in friendly urls - syntax
Ok, I'm trying to establish some business rules of syntax for SEO friendly URLS. I'm doing this for an OpenCart online store which uses a SEO-url field to construct the "friendly URL's". The good news of that is I have total control over the urls' the bad news is I had to do some tricky Excel work to populate them. That all said, I have a problem with items that have sizes. This is a crafts store so many of the items are differentiated by size. Examples: Sleigh Bells, come in 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2" etc. So far Ive tried to stay away from inch mark " by spelling it out. Right now its inch but could be in. The numbers, fractions, sizes etc. create some ghastly friendly URL's. Is there any wisdom or syntax standards out there that would help me. I'm trying to avoid this: www.mysite.com//index.php?route=craft-accessories/bells/sleigh-bells/sleigh-bells-1-one-half-inch-with-loop I realize that the category (sleigh-bells) is repeated in the product name but there are several 1 1/2" items in the store. Any thoughts would be useful, even if it's links to good SEO sites that have mastered the myriad of issues with dimensions in the urls. thanks
Technical SEO | | jbcul0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Allow or Disallow First in Robots.txt
If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command? example: Allow: /models/ford///page* Disallow: /models////page
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
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