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
-
Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Hello, Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
Thanks in advance for your help.
-AK:2 -
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Hi, trying to dig into Google News for a large site, mostly containing news.
Technical SEO | | m.m
The structure of the site network is subdomain.domain.se, and each subdomain has it's own brand with it's own news: x.domain.se
y.domain.se
z.domain.se
etc... Each brand/subdomain is more or less to equate with its own subjectfield/section. In Google News every subdomain is configured with it's own Site Source url, but also having the set up with one section with the same url. It seems like they're getting conflicts in Google News, Google can't always figure out which news article to which brand. Example: an article owned by brand A, but it is sometimes happens that articles getting labeled as brand B in the news SERP, though the link takes you correctly to brand A. I am thinking that this config in News Publisher Center may be a problem? Anyone having any thoughts if that would be better if we delete all source urls except for domain.se-brand and then put all the other subdomains as sections? www.domain.se x.domain.se y.doamin.se z.domain.se Any smart thoughts on this one? Or anything else that could make this wrong labeling (all content included images are hosted in same domain for example). Regards,
Magnus0 -
Speed benefits from loading images from a subdomain
I have read that loading images from a subdomain of your site instead of the main domain will give you speed benefits on load time. Has anyone actually seen that to be the case? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Is there any value in having a blank robots.txt file?
I've read an audit where the writer recommended creating and uploading a blank robots.txt file, there was no current file in place. Is there any merit in having a blank robots.txt file? What is the minimum you would include in a basic robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
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