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, does it need preceding directory structure?
-
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match?
e.g:
I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block
/fish
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anythingBut would it block?:
en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything(taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier!
As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as:
http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybobBut have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as:
http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingyThanks for listening
-
Yes this is what I thought, but wanted some second opinions.
Although I wouldn't actually need a wild card after BTS, as just leaving it open is the same as using a wildcard:
/fish*.......... Equivalent to "/fish" -- the trailing wildcard is ignored. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt Thanks for the link, I'll take a look
-
You're right in with the **Disallow: /fish **in the robots file blocking all those initial links, but if you wanted to block everything inside the /en/ folder, you would need to do disallow: /en/fish
You could use a wildcard in the robots.txt file to do something along the lines of Disallow: /BTS-*
This _'should' _work, but it's always worth checking using a tool to make sure it's all implemented correctly. Distilled did a post a while back about a JS tool which allows you to test if robots.txt files work correctly which can be found here - http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/js-bookmarklet-for-checking-if-a-page-is-blocked-by-robots-txt/
In addition to this, you could also use the 'blocked URLs' tool in GWT to see if the pages are successfully blocked once you've implemented the code.
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
-
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
Robots.txt blocked internal resources Wordpress
Hi all, We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted. I've created the following new one: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php However, in the site audit on SemRush, I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts. Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO? Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index? Thanks for your thoughts!2 -
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
URL structure change and xml sitemap
At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang0 -
Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt0 -
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 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4