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.
Robots.txt on subdomains
-
Hi guys!
I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
-
That's about as comprehensive an answer as I could have hoped for. Thanks Ryan, really appreciated.
-
Mostly no. I say 'mostly' because a lot of times when you look at a site using www and no-www if both of those work they're almost always pulling files from the same location (hence the warnings around duplicate content), so both www.domain.com/robots.txt and domain.com/robots.txt are going to work. This is the dominant example of a subdomain sharing a robots.txt file. However, on domains that are set up as their own subdomains they have different robots.txt. Take a look at the many differences between subdomain1-1000.wordpress.com/robots.txt vs wordpress.com/robots.txt. If you set up a subdomain that isn't just a reflection of your root domain, then you'll need to create a robots.txt file as well. Cheers!
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
-
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Does a subdomain benefit from being on a high authority domain?
I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Does an subdomain hosted offsite provide SEO value
We have a job board hosted through an applicant processing system which we've setup as a subdomain (jobs.ourcompany.com), most of the assets are hosted on our primary domain (ourcompany.com). My question is does having it hosted offsite provide any value? Do we get credit for that content being shared and distributed on the web or does the applicant processing system? As I see it the options are (correct me if I'm wrong): Host the job listings on our primary domain (ourcompany.com/jobs) and have it point to the application on the subdomain. Advertise the job listings pointing to the primary domain on the paid sites. The free job listing sites will automatically point to the sub-domain because the applicant processing system automatically submits them. Host the job listings entirely on the sub-domain applicant tracking system and link to it from our primary site navigation. Advertise the job listings to the sub-domain so that both free and paid point to the same place. Obviously the second one would be much easier just not sure on the technical side of our website getting credit by search engines as the one who has produced the content.
Technical SEO | | r1200gsa0 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Best geotargeting strategy: Subdomains or subfolders or country specific domain
How have the relatively recent changes in how G perceives subdomains changed the best route to onsite geotargeting i.e. not building out new country specific sites on country specific and hosted domains and instead developing sub-domains or sub-folders and geo-targeting those via webmaster tools ? In other words, given the recent change in G perception, are sub-domains now a better option than a sub-folder or is there not much in it ? Also if client has a .co.uk and they want to geo-target say France, is the sub-domain/sub-folder route still an option or is the .co.uk still too UK specific, and these options would only work using a .com ? In other words can sites on country specific domains (.co.uk , .fr, .de etc etc) use sub-folders or domains to geo-target other countries or do they have no option other than to develop new country specific (domains/hosting/language) websites ? Any thoughts regarding current best practice in this regard much appreciated. I have seen last Febs WBF which covers geotargeting in depth but the way google perceives subdomains has changed since then Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls. So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*? To prevent the price faceted url from being cached: /category.html?price=1%2C1000
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88 Thanks!0 -
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 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0