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
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themesetc, 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
Dan
-
many thanks for that Dan !
-
As far as I thought, the important thing is that your feed shows up in feed readers. Can you subscribe to and view your RSS feed in a variety of different feed readers?
Yes, so long as the ? is utilized only in ways in which would result in duplicate content, or content that would not be desirable to crawl, it will have that effect.
-Dan
-
Many Thanks for your comments Dan !
So it doesnt matter that the feeds not going to be crawled, dont we want feeds to be crawled usually?
Blocking anything with a ? is surely good then isnt it since prevents all the dupe content etc one gets from search results ?
Yes my clients webmaster set it up
-
Hi Dan
I see no reason to disallow the feed like that by default, unless there is some reason I don't know about. But it won't harm anything either.
The second part blocks any URL which begins with a ? (question mark). This would block anything that has a parameter in the URL - most commonly a search word, pagination, filtering settings etc.
As far as I'm aware this is not going to be damaging to the site, but it's not the default setting. Did someone set it up that way for you?
My robots.txt shows the default WordPress settings: http://www.evolvingseo.com/robots.txt
-
Hi Dan
Yes please find below, please can you also confirm if the bottom 2 lines refer to blocking internal search results ?:
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: */feedDisallow: /?
Disallow: /*?Many Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan
Can you share the exact line disallowing RSS?
Thanks!
-Dan
-
sorry 1 more question, i see that the webmaster has disallowed the feeds in the robots.txt file is this normal/desirable, i would have thought one would want rss feeds crawled by Google ?
-
nice 1 cheers Jesse !
-
Your assumption is correct. The disallows you listed are directories, not pages. Therefore, anything within the Plugins folder will be disallowed, same with the cache and themes folder.
So you may have multiple files (and I'm sure you do) within each of those folders.
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
-
Adding your sitemap to robots.txt
Hi everyone, Best practice question: When adding your sitemap to your robots.txt file, do you add the whole sitemap at once or do you add different subcategories (products, posts, categories,..) separately? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
Duplicate content: using the robots meta tag in conjunction with the canonical tag?
We have a WordPress instance on an Apache subdomain (let's say it's blog.website.com) alongside our main website, which is built in Angular. The tech team is using Akamai to do URL rewrites so that the blog posts appear under the main domain (website.com/more-keywords/here). However, due to the way they configured the WordPress install, they can't do a wildcard redirect under htaccess to force all the subdomain URLs to appear as subdirectories, so as you might have guessed, we're dealing with duplicate content issues. They could in theory do manual 301s for each blog post, but that's laborious and a real hassle given our IT structure (we're a financial services firm, so lots of bureaucracy and regulation). In addition, due to internal limitations (they seem mostly political in nature), a robots.txt file is out of the question. I'm thinking the next best alternative is the combined use of the robots meta tag (no index, follow) alongside the canonical tag to try to point the bot to the subdirectory URLs. I don't think this would be unethical use of either feature, but I'm trying to figure out if the two would conflict in some way? Or maybe there's a better approach with which we're unfamiliar or that we haven't considered?
Technical SEO | | prasadpathapati0 -
Do robot.txts permanently affect websites even after they have been removed?
A client has a Wordpress blog to sit alongside their company website. They kept it hidden whilst they were developing what it looked like, keeping it un-searchable by Search Engines. It was still live, but Wordpress put a robots.txt in place. When they were ready they removed the robots.txt by clicking the "allow Search Engines to crawl this site" button. It took a month and a half for their blog to show in Search Engines once the robot.txt was removed. Google is now recognising the site (as a "site:" test has shown) however, it doesn't rank well for anything. This is despite the fact they are targeting keywords with very little organic competition. My question is - could the fact that they developed the site behind a robot.txt (rather than offline) mean the site is permanently affected by the robot.txt in the eyes of the Search Engines, even after that robot.txt has been removed? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on the situation.
Technical SEO | | Driver720 -
Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/ I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.) However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't. As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority. How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.) Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks. Proof I'm not crazy in attached video. robotstxt_addon_domain.mp4
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Robots.txt on refinements
In dealing with Panda do you think it is a good idea to put all refinements for category pages in the robots.txt file? We already have a lot as noindex, follow but I am wondering if it would be better to address from a crawl perspective as the pages are probably thin duplicate content to Google.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Same URL in "Duplicate Content" and "Blocked by robots.txt"?
How can the same URL show up in Seomoz Crawl Diagnostics "Most common errors and warnings" in both the "Duplicate Content"-list and the "Blocked by robots.txt"-list? Shouldnt the latter exclude it from the first list?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Help needed with robots.txt regarding wordpress!
Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched. http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743 http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240 These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes. IS there a reason I should block any pages contained in wodrpress? Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*/trackback Disallow: /*/feed Disallow: /*/comments Disallow: /? Disallow: /*? Disallow: /page/
Technical SEO | | ENSO
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0