Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    6970
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • workathomecareers
      workathomecareers last edited by

      Hi

      My robots file is currently set up as listed below.

      From an SEO point of view is it good to disallow feeds, rss and comments?

      I feel allowing comments would be a good thing because it's new content that may rank in the search engines as the comments left on my blog often refer to questions or companies folks are searching for more information on. And the comments are added regularly.

      What's your take? I'm also concerned about the /page being blocked. Not sure how that benefits my blog from an SEO point of view as well. Look forward to your feedback.

      Thanks.

      Eddy

      User-agent: Googlebot
      Crawl-delay: 10
      Allow: /*
      
      User-agent: *
      Crawl-delay: 10
      Disallow: /wp-
      Disallow: /feed/
      Disallow: /trackback/
      Disallow: /rss/
      Disallow: /comments/feed/
      Disallow: /page/
      Disallow: /date/
      Disallow: /comments/
      
      # Allow Everything
      Allow: /*
      
      
      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • FedeEinhorn
        FedeEinhorn @workathomecareers last edited by

        If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines.

        Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps.

        Give it a try, you can always disable plugins 🙂

        Wish you the best!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • DaveSottimano
          DaveSottimano @workathomecareers last edited by

          Wordpress is a funny platform, you would think that there isn't much to disallow but there probably is quite a bit.  I agree with Federico - you should allow comments, feed, and rss.

          I'm not going to make blind assumptions here, so you should check your log files to see what's being constantly crawled, feel free to read this http://moz.com/blog/server-log-essentials-for-seo.

          FYI - This is a big job. Shout if you need help.

          P.S - Hostgator's Cpanel will allow you to archive raw server logs, make sure you check that option from now on or they'll be overwritten!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • workathomecareers
            workathomecareers @FedeEinhorn last edited by

            Thanks for the info!

            I contacted Hostgator to fix the robots file because it had been blocking Google's bot for some time now. So that's the robot file they uploaded.

            Yes I use wordpress, and apparently some stupid plugin had originally blocked google before hostgator fixed the robots file yesterday.

            So to confirm you don't think anything else should be disallowed except for the /wp-admin directory. With the feeds, comments, etc, there isn't any SEO concerns like duplicate content or anything else that may work against me that should be blocked.

            Is this safe to assume?

            Thanks again!

            Eddy

            DaveSottimano FedeEinhorn 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • FedeEinhorn
              FedeEinhorn last edited by

              Who wrote that robots.txt?

              You shouldn't disallow the comments, or feed or almost anything.

              I notice you are using wordpress, so if you just want to avoid the admin being indexed (which will isn't going to be as Google does not have access anyway), your robots.txt should look like this:

              User-Agent:*

              Disallow: /wp-admin/

              That's it.

              workathomecareers 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Mat_C

                Robots.txt blocked internal resources Wordpress

                Hi all, We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted.  I've created the following new one: User-agent: *
                Allow: /
                Disallow: /wp-admin/
                Disallow: /wp-includes/
                Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
                Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
                Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
                Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php However, in the site audit on SemRush,  I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts. Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO? Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index? Thanks for your thoughts!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
                2
              • Mat_C

                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: *
                Disallow: ?filter= or User-agent: *
                Disallow: /?filter= In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
                1
              • vetofunk

                Robots.txt & Disallow: /*? Question!

                Hi, I have a site where they have: Disallow: /*? Problem is we need the following indexed: ?utm_source=google_shopping What would the best solution be? I have read: User-agent: *
                Allow: ?utm_source=google_shopping
                Disallow: /*? Any ideas?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk
                0
              • bgvsiteadmin

                No index detected in robots meta tag GSC issue_Help Please

                Hi Everyone, We just did a site migration ( URL structure change, site redesign, CMS change). During migration, dev team messed up badly on a few things including SEO. The old site had pages canonicalized and self canonicalized <> New site doesn't have anything (CMS dev error) so we are working retroactively to add canonicalization mechanism The legacy site had URL’s ending with a trailing slash “/” <> new site got redirected to Set of url’s without “/” New site action : All robots are allowed: A new sitemap is submitted to google search console So here is my problem (it been a long 24hr night for me  🙂 ) 1. Now when I look at GSC homepage URL it says that old page is self canonicalized and currently in index (old page with a trailing slash at the end of URL). 2. When I try to perform a live URL test, I get the message "No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag" , so indexation cant be done. I have no idea where noindex is coming from. 3. Robots.txt in search console still showing old file ( no noindex there ) I tried to submit new file but old one still coming up. When I click on "See live robots.txt" I get current robots. 4. I see that old page is still canonicalized and attempting to index redirected old page might be confusing google Hope someone can help to get the new page indexed! I really need it 🙂  Please ping me if you need more clarification. Thank you ! Thank you

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
                1
              • Tylerj

                Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?

                I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj
                0
              • GSO

                Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?

                I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO
                0
              • kylesuss

                Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

                Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss
                12
              • AndrewY

                Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt

                Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links.  While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google.  For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do?  Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed.  Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY
                1

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.