How do you block development servers with robots.txt?
-
When we create client websites the urls are client.oursite.com. Google is indexing theses sites and attaching to our domain. How can we stop it with robots.txt? I've heard you need to have the robots file on both the main site and the dev sites... A code sample would be groovy. Thanks, TR
-
Added X robots tag into our headers on our development sites.
Just a note - if you use apache and have mod_pagespeed installed , it wall conflict and pagespeed will remove the X robots tag.
Begin Bad Bot Blocking
BrowserMatchNoCase Googlebot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase bingbot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase OmniExplorer_Bot/6.11.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase omniexplorer_bot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase yandex bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase yandeximages bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Spinn3r bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase sogou bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/4.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase sosospider+ bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase jikespider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ia_archiver bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase PaperLiBot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SiteBot/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger-Explorer/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase boardreader bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase radian6 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase R6_FeedFetcher bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase R6_CommentReader bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ScoutJet bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase CC-rget/5.818 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase libwww-perl/5.813 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase magpie-crawler 1.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase jakarta bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase discobot/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.5 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SemrushBot/0.9 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MLBot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase butterfly bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SeznamBot/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase HuaweiSymantecSpider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Exabot/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase netseer/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer crawler/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer/Nutch-0.9 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase psbot/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Moreoverbot/x.00 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase moreoverbot/5.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SocialSpider-Finder/0.2 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MaxPointCrawler/Nutch-1.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase willow bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_botEnd Bad Bot Blocking
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
Begin Bad Bot Blocking
BrowserMatchNoCase Googlebot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase bingbot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase OmniExplorer_Bot/6.11.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase omniexplorer_bot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase yandex bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase yandeximages bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Spinn3r bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase sogou bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/4.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase sosospider+ bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase jikespider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ia_archiver bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase PaperLiBot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SiteBot/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger-Explorer/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase boardreader bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase radian6 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase R6_FeedFetcher bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase R6_CommentReader bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ScoutJet bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase CC-rget/5.818 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase libwww-perl/5.813 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase magpie-crawler 1.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase jakarta bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase discobot/1.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.5 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SemrushBot/0.9 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MLBot bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase butterfly bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SeznamBot/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase HuaweiSymantecSpider bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Exabot/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase netseer/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer crawler/2.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer/Nutch-0.9 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase psbot/0.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Moreoverbot/x.00 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase moreoverbot/5.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase SocialSpider-Finder/0.2 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase MaxPointCrawler/Nutch-1.1 bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase willow bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_botEnd Bad Bot Blocking
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
-
On the root of the development subdomain, use the following robots.txt content to block all robots.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Next, verify the subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools as its own site, and request that that site be removed from the index.
For added protection:
- Make the robots.txt on the live site read only, so when you copy the dev site over you don't accidentally copy over the robots.txt saying to exclude everything
- Set up a code monitor on the robots.txt for both the dev site and the live site that checks the content of those files and alerts you if there are changes. I use https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php.
-
Like Daniel said you can use robots.txt to block spiders, but this won't guarantee exclusion of URLs showing up in search results. You could use x-robots-tag in the server headers. Generate a 403 every time user-agent hits the sub domain.
-
I put a .htaccess style password on the development site. If you make a robots.txt to block the site, make sure you don't accidentally put that on the production site.
-
Unfortunately I don't have that option.
-
Just use a directory instead of a sub-domain and then block that directory... that's the easiest way.
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
-
Help recover lost traffic (70%) from robots.txt error.
Our site is a company information site with 15 million indexed pages (mostly company profiles). Recently we had an issue with a server that we replaced, and in the processes mistakenly copied the robots.txt block from the staging server to a live server. By the time we realized the error, we lost 2/3 of our indexed pages and a comparable amount of traffic. Apparently this error took place on 4/7/19, and was corrected two weeks later. We have submitted new sitemaps to Google and asked them to validate the fix approximately a week ago. Given the close to 10 million pages that need to be validated, so far we have not seen any meaningful change. Will we ever get this traffic back? How long will it take? Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. On another note, these indexed pages were never migrated to SSL for fear of losing traffic. If we have already lost the traffic and/or if it is going to take a long time to recover, should we migrate these pages to SSL? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | akin671 -
Robots.txt Question for E-Commerce Sites
Hi All, I have a couple of e-commerce clients and have a question about URLs. When you perform a search on website all URLs contain a question mark, for example: /filter.aspx?search=blackout I'm not sure that I want these indexed. Could I be causing any harm/danger if I add this to the robots.txt file? /*? Any suggestions welcome! Gavin
On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency0 -
Tech/Development Pricing ??
Hi I've submitted some site change request to a clients dev team and they have got back with a rather large quote thats left me gobsmacked, so i want to run it by any of you to get your feedback ? Creating/integrating a dynamic xml site map @ £3450 Fixing Crawl Errors & Warning reported by Moz report (i..e adding canonicalisation tag to each page to deal with dupe content and a few other small/misc items) @ £4850 Setting up/enabling ecom tracking in Analytics @ £910 Setting up 1 events based goal in analytics @ £490 Are these prices even plausible ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to exclude URL filter searches in robots.txt
When I look through my MOZ reports I can see it's included 'pages' which it shouldn't have included i.e. adding filtering rules such as this one http://www.mydomain.com/brands?color=364&manufacturer=505 How can I exclude all of these filters in the robots.txt? I think it'll be: Disallow: /*?color=$ Is that the correct syntax with the $ sign in it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | neenor0 -
Solve duplicate content issues by using robots.txt
Hi, I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok? Thank for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Robots file include sitemap
Hello, I see that google, facebook and moz... have robots.txt include sitemap at the footer.
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
Eg: http://www.google.com.vn/robots.txt Sitemap: http://www.google.com/sitemaps_webmasters.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/ventures/sitemap_ventures.xml Should I include my sitemap file (sitemap.xml) at the footer of robots.txt and why should do this? Thanks,0 -
Best practice for Meta-Robots tag in categories and author pages?
For some of our site we use Wordpress, which we really like working with. The question I have is for the categories and authors pages (and similiar pages), i.e. the one looking: http://www.domain.com/authors/. Should you or should you not use follow, noindex for meta-robots? We have a lot of categories/tags/authors which generates a lot of pages. I'm a bit worried that google won't like this and leaning towards adding the follow, noindex. But the more I read about it, the more I see people disagree. What does the community of Seomoz think?
On-Page Optimization | | Lobtec0 -
Photogallery and Robots.txt
Hey everyone SEOMOZ is telling us that there are to many onpage links on the following page: http://www.surfcampinportugal.com/photos-of-the-camp/ Should we stop it from being indexed via Robots.txt? best regards and thanks in advance... Simon
On-Page Optimization | | Rapturecamps0