I want to block search bots in crawling all my website's pages expect for homepage. Is this rule correct?
-
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*
-
-
Thanks Matt! I will surely test this one.
-
Thanks David! Will try this one.
-
Use this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /User-agent: *
Disallow: /This is what I use to block our dev sites from being indexed and we've had no issues.
-
Actually, there are two regex that Robots can handle - asterisk and $.
You should test this one. I think it will work (about 95% sure - tested in WMT quickly):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /$ -
I don't think that will work. Robots.txt doesn't handle regular expressions. You will have to explicitly list all of the folders, and files to be super sure, that nothing is indexed unless you want it to be found.
This is kind of an odd question. I haven't thought about something like this in a while. I usually want everything but a couple folders indexed. : ) I found something that may be a little more help. Try reading this.
If you're working with extensions, you can use **Disallow:/*.html$ **or php or what have you. That may get you closer to a solution.
Definitely test this with a crawler that obeys robots.txt.
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
-
How long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
Blog page and homepage ranking next to each other for same keyword
Hello, I have my homepage that has been existing for 10 years that is ranked in 18 th position on google for the keyword luxury bike tours. This homepage doesn't have any external link or internal links saying luxury bike tours and nowhere in the title or on the page do I have the word luxury. I only have the words bike and tours. I created a blog page 24 hours ago that has the word luxury, bike and tours in the title and it is ranked in 19 th position just behind my homepage. I am wondering how it can be there and my homepage just be one spot above with all the history and linking it has ? Is it due to the fact that I have the word luxury in the title ? Is it just because my internal linking structure is correct and this blog page is brand new and will my homepage rank higher in the near future but see that I just redid the structure I need to wait a few months ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Landing pages "dropping" and being replaced with homepage?
Hi Moz People Happy new year to all, I have an interesting one here. I have recently been making some landing pages and they have all pretty much hit page 1 for the search terms I've focused on (UK Domain). Up until this morning the landing page was the 8th organic result on the UK domain. However I have checked this morning and the landing page has dropped below the top 50 and instead our homepage is now showing as the last organic result on page 1. This is intriguing to me as it has also happened to a couple of other landing pages I have made. Is this due to the relevance being driven higher by the landing pages but overall the homepage is more important to Google? Do you guys think this might start happening to the other pages that I have created? Any input would be appreciated! ( Ill give you links and search terms if you want to take a look for yourselves but I try to refrain from "self advertising" ) Happy Thursday Mozzers ! Jamie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
404 Pages. Can I change it to do this without getting penalized ? I want to lower our bounce rate from these pages to encourage the user to continue on the site
Hi All, We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is - http://goo.gl/rFRNMt I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ? So it will look like this - http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8 . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc... Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating. basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away. If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Zip Code Blocks the Search Engines!
I have a site where when you visit the product pages, it asks for your zip code. This is obviously blocking the bots from crawling the site. I know you can basically tell the bots how to ignore the zip code feature but I am not exactly sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhawk0