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
-
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
SSL for subdomain is good or bad?
Hello, We have SSL certificate for our domain only for *.website.com, And now, we have few subdomains, as you know, we have two choices: 1. Using HTTPS for subdomain https://me.website.com, while it has problem with https://www.me.website.com (SSL error) 2. Using HTTP for subdomain, which has www and non-www with redirects. Which one is good for us?
Technical SEO | | Anetwork0 -
Should I blow up our subdomain?
Hey folks, Several years ago we created a couple subdomains (ie, NEWS.URL.COM) and the posts that we put on this subdomain were very full of keyword anchor text links. Each post sometimes had 4-5. We haven't posted any new content on this subdomain for 3 years. After getting hit with manual "linking" penalty, we disavowed tons of links. But left the links on the subdomains alone. They really aren't providing any traffic and the content is poor, and not written by me. Do you think having these links is hindering our ranking efforts? I think I should just blow up this subdomain and get rid of it and all the keyword anchor links. Thoughts? Thanks ron Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Robots.txt and joomla
Hello, I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address )
and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage ( is that useful )
as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful ) any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ? Thank you,0 -
Magento Robots & overly dynamic URL-s
How can i block all URL-s on a Magento store that have 2 or more dynamic parameters in it, since all the parameters have attribute name in it and not some uniform ID Would something like: Disallow: /?&* work? Since the only thing that is constant throughout all the custom parameters is that they are separated with "&" Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
Should search pages be disallowed in robots.txt?
The SEOmoz crawler picks up "search" pages on a site as having duplicate page titles, which of course they do. Does that mean I should put a "Disallow: /search" tag in my robots.txt? When I put the URL's into Google, they aren't coming up in any SERPS, so I would assume everything's ok. I try to abide by the SEOmoz crawl errors as much as possible, that's why I'm asking. Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
How can I exclude display ads from robots.txt?
Google has stated that you can do this to get spiders to content only, and faster. Our IT guy is saying it's impossible.
Technical SEO | | GregBeddor
Do you know how to exlude display ads from robots.txt? Any help would be much appreciated.0 -
Subdomain Setting in MozBar
I'm using the MozBar on FF6 and have a question about the selector next to "Root Domain" When I set it to "Subdomain", I notice that DmR and DmT are different from the root domain. Am I looking at DmR and DmT for all subdomains (www included)?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0
