How to prevent directory from being accessed by search engines?
-
Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.
-
But don't forget to remove that Disallow out of Robots.txt when you go live - if you want those pages to be indexed (and also the Meta-robots noindex nofollow).
Otherwise you might be pulling your hair out trying to figure out why none of your pages are getting indexed in the SERPs.
-
You're absolutely right! I left that part out. Thanks
-
The robots.txt file does not guarantee that your pages will not show up in search results! Your best bet after password protection is adding a NoIndex meta tag to you page headers.
Google have openly said that they obey this tag (Matt Cutts).
-
Xee,
It always help, and it is very easy to implement. This function to show the path to the sitemap ir very good.
-
It's not required to have the ending slash. At least, it works for us without it.
-
As it is, my site is just phpBB3 forums (www.bearsfansonline.com); would a sitemap really help that much?
-
If you don't have an robot.txt file, you need to include some important stuff first.
First, do you have a sitemap.xlm for your website? If not, its very important and you should creat it at: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Create a robot.txt file and include the follow:
User-agent: * allow: / disallow: /directoryname
Sitemap: http://www.yousite.com/sitemap.xmlWith this you will inform all robots where is your sitemap. You should read more about robots.txt in this great post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
-
shouldn't you put a slash at the end of the directory in the robots file?
you can create the robots file through the Google Webmaster Tools
-
I don't have a robots.txt file in my root. Do I just create a text file, put the above lines into it, and upload it to my root after changing the name?
-
I'm assuming you want all search engines blocked from this directory. If so, edit your robots.txt file to state the following. This will block all bots from accessing a folder/directory on your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directoryname
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
-
Search Console Indexed Page Count vs Site:Search Operator page count
We launched a new site and Google Search Console is showing 39 pages have been indexed. When I perform a Site:myurl.com search I see over 100 pages that appear to be indexed. Which is correct and why is there a discrepancy? Also, Search Console Page Index count started at 39 pages on 5/21 and has not increased even though we have hundreds of pages to index. But I do see more results each week from Site:psglearning.com My site is https://wwww.psglearning.com
Technical SEO | | pdowling0 -
Brushing up on my SEO skills - how do I check my website to see if Javascript is blocking search engines from crawling the links within a javascript-enabled drop down menu?
I set my user agent in my Chrome browser to Googlebot and I disable javascript within my Chrome settings, but then what?
Technical SEO | | MagnitudeSEO0 -
Search Console has found over 18k 404 errors in my site, should I redirect?
most of them where old URLs pointed from a really old domain, that we have just shutten down. If the pages didn't receive any traffic, should we redirect? If I follow this https://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes we shouldn't
Technical SEO | | pablo_carrara0 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Google displaying "Items 1-9" before the description in the Search Results
We see our pages coming up in Google with the category page/product numbers in front of our descriptions. For example: Items 1 - 24 of 86 (and than the descriptions follows). Our website is magento based. Is there a fix for this that anyone knows of? Is there method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?
Technical SEO | | DutchG0 -
How to avoid duplicate content on internal search results page?
Hi, according to Webmaster Tools and Siteliner our website have an above-average amount of duplicate content. Most of the pages are the search results pages, where it finds only one result. The only difference in this case are the TDK, H1 and the breadcrumbs. The rest of the layout is pretty static and similar. Here is an example for two pages with "duplicate content": https://soundbetter.com/search/Globo https://soundbetter.com/search/Volvo Edit: These are legitimate results that happen to have the same result. In this case we want users to be able to find the audio engineers by 'credits' (musicians they've worked with). Tags. We want users to rank for people searching for 'engineers who worked with'. And searching for two different artists (credit tags) returns this one service provider, with different urls (the tag being the search parameter) hence the duplicate content. I guess every e-commerce/directory website faces this kind of issue. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content on search results page?
Technical SEO | | ShaqD1 -
Sitel inks suddenly vanished in google search
Hello, My site is designzzz.com if you will search in google the term : designzzz it use to return sitelinks below , but now it isn't, what could be the reason ? cheers
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
Will duplicate content on ecommerce cause harm in search results?
First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client. A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme. So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity) ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?
Technical SEO | | BeIntermedia0