I have two sitemaps which partly duplicate - one is blocked by robots.txt but can't figure out why!
-
Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?
-
There are standards for the sitemaps .txt and .xml sitemaps, where there are no standards for html varieties. Neither guarantees the listed pages will be crawled, though. HTML has some advantage of potentially passing pagerank, where .txt and .xml varieties don't.
These days, xml sitemaps may be more common than .txt sitemaps but both perform the same function.
-
yes, sitemap.txt is blocked for some strange reason. I know SEOs do this sometimes for various reasons, but in this case it just doesn't make sense - not to me, anyway.
-
Thanks for the useful feedback Chris - much appreciated - Is it good practice to use both - I guess it's a good idea if onsite version only includes top-level pages? PS. Just checking nature of block!
-
Luke,
The .php one would have been created as a navigation tool to help users find what they're looking for faster, as well as to provide html links to search engine spiders to help them reach all pages on the site. On small sites, such sitemaps often include all pages of the site, on large ones, it might just be high level pages. The .txt file is non html and exists to provide search engines with a full list of urls on the site for the sole purpose of helping search engines index all the site's pages.
The robots.txt file can also be used to specify the location of the sitemap.txt file such as
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_location.txt
Are you sure the sitemap is being blocked by the robots.txt file or is the robots.txt file just listing the location of the sitemap.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
-
Block session id URLs with robots.txt
Hi, I would like to block all URLs with the parameter '?filter=' from being crawled by including them in the robots.txt. Which directive should I use: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Disallow: ?filter= or User-agent: *
Disallow: /?filter= In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary? Thanks!1 -
Robots.txt - blocking JavaScript and CSS, best practice for Magento
Hi Mozzers, I'm looking for some feedback regarding best practices for setting up Robots.txt file in Magento. I'm concerned we are blocking bots from crawling essential information for page rank. My main concern comes with blocking JavaScript and CSS, are you supposed to block JavaScript and CSS or not? You can view our robots.txt file here Thanks, Blake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeapOfBelief0 -
Value in creating an 'All listings' sitemap?
Hello, I work for the Theater discovery website, theatermania.com. Users can browse current shows on a city-by-city basis, such as New York: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/shows/ My question is, is there any SEO benefit in us creating a single page that lists all shows (both current and non-current) across the US? My boss mentioned that this could help our long tail results, but I'm not so sure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Meta canonical or simply robots.txt other domain names with same content?
Hi, I'm working with a new client who has a main product website. This client has representatives who also sells the same products but all those reps have a copy of the same website on another domain name. The best thing would probably be to shut down the other (same) websites and redirect 301 them to the main, but that's impossible in the minding of the client. First choice : Implement a conical meta for all the URL on all the other domain names. Second choice : Robots.txt with disallow for all the other websites. Third choice : I'm really open to other suggestions 😉 Thank you very much! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Robot.txt help
Hi, We have a blog that is killing our SEO. We need to Disallow Disallow: /Blog/?tag*
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio33
Disallow: /Blog/?page*
Disallow: /Blog/category/*
Disallow: /Blog/author/*
Disallow: /Blog/archive/*
Disallow: /Blog/Account/.
Disallow: /Blog/search*
Disallow: /Blog/search.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/error404.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/archive*
Disallow: /Blog/archive.aspx
Disallow: /Blog/sitemap.axd
Disallow: /Blog/post.aspx But Allow everything below /Blog/Post The disallow list seems to keep growing as we find issues. So rather than adding in to our Robot.txt all the areas to disallow. Is there a way to easily just say Allow /Blog/Post and ignore the rest. How do we do that in Robot.txt Thanks0 -
Panda Updates - robots.txt or noindex?
Hi, I have a site that I believe has been impacted by the recent Panda updates. Assuming that Google has crawled and indexed several thousand pages that are essentially the same and the site has now passed the threshold to be picked out by the Panda update, what is the best way to proceed? Is it enough to block the pages from being crawled in the future using robots.txt, or would I need to remove the pages from the index using the meta noindex tag? Of course if I block the URLs with robots.txt then Googlebot won't be able to access the page in order to see the noindex tag. Anyone have and previous experiences of doing something similar? Thanks very much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ianmcintosh0 -
Will implementing a 'Scroll to Div Anchor' cause a duplicate content issue?
I have just been building a website for a client with pages that contain a lot of text content. To make things easier for site visitors I have created a menu bar that sticks to the top of the page and the page will scroll to different areas of content (i/e different Div id anchors) Having done this I have just had the thought that this might inadvertently introduce duplicate content issue. Does anyone know if adding an #anchor to the end of a url will cause a duplicate content error in google? For example, would the following URLs be treated as different:- http://www.mysite.co.uk/services
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor1
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor2
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor3
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor4 Thanks.0 -
Robots.txt 404 problem
I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0
