What should I block with a robots.txt file?
-
Hi Mozzers,
We're having a hard time getting our site indexed, and I have a feeling my dev team may be blocking too much of our site via our robots.txt file.
They say they have disallowed php and smarty files.
Is there any harm in allowing these pages?
Thanks!
-
Hi Andy, here you go: www.consumerbase.com/robots.txt
I know we want to block the .html files, but I am unsure about the other folders.
I guess I would need to know for certain from my programmers that none of our content is in there?
-
I'm not too hot on Smarty, but doesn't this generate the HTML templates?
However, this shouldn't cause a problem because the files that are being generated are html so as long as they have done this right, it should be fine.
Do you want to ping me the robots file or URL over and I will have a look for you?
Andy
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
-
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Blocking Dynamic Search Result Pages From Google
Hi Mozzerds, I have a quick question that probably won't have just one solution. Most of the pages that Moz crawled for duplicate content we're dynamic search result pages on my site. Could this be a simple fix of just blocking these pages from Google altogether? Or would Moz just crawl these pages as critical crawl errors instead of content errors? Ultimately, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to rank for these pages but I don't think it's worth it considering I have multiple product pages that rank well. I think in my case, the best is probably to leave out these search pages since they have more of a negative impact on my site resulting in more content errors than I would like. So would blocking these pages from the Search Engines and Moz be a good idea? Maybe a second opinion would help: what do you think I should do? Is there another way to go about this and would blocking these pages do anything to reduce the number of content errors on my site? I appreciate any feedback! Thanks! Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewstorys0 -
Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin1 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0 -
Disallow my store in robots.txt?
Should I disallow my store directory in robots.txt? Here is the URL: https://www.stdtime.com/store/ Here are my reasons for suggesting this: SEOMOZ finds crawl "errors" in there that I don't care about I don't think I care if the search engines index those pages I only have one product, and it is not an impulse buy My product has a 60 day sales cycle, so price is less important than features
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raywhite0 -
Why should I add URL parameters where Meta Robots NOINDEX available?
Today, I have checked Bing webmaster tools and come to know about Ignore URL parameters. Bing webmaster tools shows me certain parameters for URLs where I have added META Robots with NOINDEX FOLLOW syntax. I can see canopy_search_fabric parameter in suggested section. It's due to following kind or URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1728 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1729 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=1730 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search=2239 But, I have added META Robots NOINDEX Follow to disallow crawling. So, why should it happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Blocking HTTP 1.0?
One of my clients believes someone is trying to hack their site. We are seeing the requests with a server protocol or HTTP 1.0 so they want to block 1.0 entirely. Will this cause any problems with search engines or regular, non-spamming visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
Search Engine Blocked by robots.txt for Dynamic URLs
Today, I was checking crawl diagnostics for my website. I found warning for search engine blocked by robots.txt I have added following syntax to robots.txt file for all dynamic URLs. Disallow: /*?osCsid Disallow: /*?q= Disallow: /*?dir= Disallow: /*?p= Disallow: /*?limit= Disallow: /*review-form Dynamic URLs are as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/bar-stools?dir=desc&order=position http://www.vistastores.com/bathroom-lighting?p=2 and many more... So, Why should it shows me warning for this? Does it really matter or any other solution for these kind of dynamic URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0