Blocking robots.txt
-
Do you know any methods to block robots.txt file from external users?
-
You can block on server side all IP except Google bot for any file, but it may lead to ban, because of cloaking.
-
There is no setting or feature to do this, but you can do it with code
You could detect the useragnet and create a robot.txt dynamically depending on the useragent.
But i cant see why you would want to do this. -
Hi Zsolt
I don't believe there is a way to, not in a Windows environment anyway.
Robots.txt has to be hosted at website root level, as in example.com/robots.txt which is where search engine bots look for it. If a bot can find it (which they usually need to if one exists) then a person can too.
If there are pages or folders that you don't want anybody to know about, exclude them from robots.txt and edit the Meta Robots tag on each page concerned to e.g. NoIndex, Follow or whatever is appropriate.
Regards
Simon
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
-
X-robots tag causing no index issues
I have an interesting problem with a site which has an x-robot tag blocking the site from being indexed, the site is in Wordpress, there are no issues with the robots.txt or at the page level, I cant find the noindex anywhere. I removed the SEO plug-in which was there and installed Yoast but it made no difference. this is the url: https://www.cotswoldflatroofing.com/ Its coming up with a HTTP error: x-robots tag noindex, nofollow, noarchive
Technical SEO | | Donsimong0 -
Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?
Hi, I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages. Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories. My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views: 8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages). Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)? Thanks,
G0 -
Canonicalize or Block?
Hi Mozers, We have staff profile pages w/ one main URL and then URLs with query parameters and jump links to take you to different parts of the page. The longer URLs with parameters canonicalize to the main pages but should they also be nonidexed? Thanks, Yael
Technical SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Need Third Party Input. Our Web host blocked all bots including Google and myself because they believe SEO is slowing down their server.
I would like some third party input... partly for my sanity and also for my client. I have a client who runs a large online bookstore. The bookstore runs in Magento and the developers are also apparently the web host. (They actually run the servers.. I do not know if they are sitting under someones desk or are actually in a data center) Their server has been slowed down by local and foreign bots. They are under the impression my SEO services are sending spammer bots to crawl and slow down their site. To fix the problem they disallowed all bots. Everything, Google, Yahoo, Bing. They also banned my access from the site. My clients organic traffic instantly took a HUGE hit. (almost 50% of their traffic is organic and over 50% is Organic + Adwords most everything from Google) Their keyword rankings are taking a quick dive as well. Could someone please verify the following as true to help me illustrate to my client that this is completely unacceptable behavior on part of the host. I believe: 1.) You should never disavow ALL robots from your site as a solution for spam. As a matter of fact most of the bad bots ignore robots.txt anyways. It is a way to limit where Google searches (which is obviously a technique to be used) 2.) On site SEO work as well as link building, etc. is not responsible for foreign bots and scrappers putting a heavy load on the server. 3.) Their behavior will ultimately lead to a massive loss of rankings (already happening) and a huge loss of traffic (already happening) and ultimately since almost half the traffic is organic the client could expect to lose a large sum of revenue from purchases made by organic traffic since it will disappear. Please give your input and thoughts. I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | JoshuaLindley1 -
"Extremely high number of URLs" warning for robots.txt blocked pages
I have a section of my site that is exclusively for tracking redirects for paid ads. All URLs under this path do a 302 redirect through our ad tracking system: http://www.mysite.com/trackingredirect/blue-widgets?ad_id=1234567 --302--> http://www.mysite.com/blue-widgets This path of the site is blocked by our robots.txt, and none of the pages show up for a site: search. User-agent: * Disallow: /trackingredirect However, I keep receiving messages in Google Webmaster Tools about an "extremely high number of URLs", and the URLs listed are in my redirect directory, which is ostensibly not indexed. If not by robots.txt, how can I keep Googlebot from wasting crawl time on these millions of /trackingredirect/ links?
Technical SEO | | EhrenReilly0 -
How to block my web from SeoMOz Crawler
Hi, I want to block mysite.com/forum from SeoMoz Crawler, how do i do that? i just want to block the forum and let the other part of my site still crawlable by seomoz. Thanks Regards
Technical SEO | | Gomu20 -
Robots.txt and joomla
Hello, I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address )
and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage ( is that useful )
as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful ) any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ? Thank you,0