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
-
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Google don't index .ee version of a website
Hello, We have a problem with our clients website .ee. This website was developed by another company and now we don't know what is wrong with it. If i do a Google search "site:.ee" it only finds konelux.ee homepage and nothing else. Also homepage title tag and meta dec is in Finnish language not in Estonian language. If i look at .ee/robots.txt it looks like robots.txt don't block Google access. Any ideas what can be wrong here? BR, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfinance0 -
Most recent blog post isn't being indexed?
http://www.howlatthemoon.com/dueling_piano_bar/kids-activities-denver/ Even if I put the URL into Google it doesn't show up....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
XML Sitemap instruction in robots.txt = Worth doing?
Hi fellow SEO's, Just a quick one, I was reading a few guides on Bing Webmaster tools and found that you can use the robots.txt file to point crawlers/bots to your XML sitemap (they don't look for it by default). I was just wondering if it would be worth creating a robots.txt file purely for the purpose of pointing bots to the XML sitemap? I've submitted it manually to Google and Bing webmaster tools but I was thinking more for the other bots (I.e. Mozbot, the SEOmoz bot?). Any thoughts would be appreciated! 🙂 Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110 -
Why is noindex more effective than robots.txt?
In this post, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo, it mentions that the noindex tag is more effective than using robots.txt for keeping URLs out of the index. Why is this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380