Does RogerBot read URL wildcards in 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
-
Robots.txt anomaly
Hi, I'm monitoring a site thats had a new design relaunch and new robots.txt added. Over the period of a week (since launch) webmaster tools has shown a steadily increasing number of blocked urls (now at 14). In the robots.txt file though theres only 12 lines with the disallow command, could this be occurring because a line in the command could refer to more than one page/url ? They all look like single urls for example: Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes etc, etc And is it normal for webmaster tools reporting of robots.txt blocked urls to steadily increase in number over time, as opposed to being identified straight away ? Thanks in advance for any help/advice/clarity why this may be happening ? Cheers Dan0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Robots.txt query
Quick question, if this appears in a clients robots.txt file, what does it mean? Disallow: /*/_/ Does it mean no pages can be indexed? I have checked and there are no pages in the index but it's a new site too so not sure if this is the problem. Thanks Karen
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
What can I do if Google Webmaster Tools doesn't recognize the robots.txt file?
I'm working on a recently hacked site for a client and and in trying to identify how exactly the hack is running I need to use the fetch as Google bot feature in GWT. I'd love to use this but it thinks the robots.txt is blocking it's acces but the only thing in the robots.txt file is a link to the sitemap. Unde the Blocked URLs section of the GWT it shows that the robots.txt was last downloaded yesterday but it's incorrect information. Is there a way to force Google to look again?
Technical SEO | | DotCar0 -
Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement. For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like: http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Technical SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Canonical URLs and screen scraping
So a little question here. I was looking into a module to help implement canonical URLs on a certain CMS and I came a cross a snarky comment about relative vs. absolute URLs being used. This person was insistent that relative URLs are fine and absolute URLs are only for people who don't know what they are doing. My question is, if using relative URLs, doesn't it make it easier to have your content scraped? After all, if you do get your content scraped at least it would point back to your site if using absolute URLs, right? Am I missing something or is my thinking OK on this? Any feedback is much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0 -
Search engines have been blocked by robots.txt., how do I find and fix it?
My client site royaloakshomesfl.com is coming up in my dashboard as having Search engines have been blocked by robots.txt, only I have no idea where to find it and fix the problem. Please help! I do have access to webmaster tools and this site is a WP site, if that helps.
Technical SEO | | LeslieVS0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0