How important is admin-ajax.php?
-
Hi there!
It's been a long time since I last did a technical audit of a site. I've currently playing with the 'fetch as google' tool to find out if we're blocking anything vital.
The site is based on Wordpress, and after a recent hacking incident, a previous SEO moved the login portal from domain.com/wp-admin/ to domain.com/pr3ss/wp-admin/ - to stop people finding it.
Fair enough. But they then updated the robots.txt file to look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pr3ss/wp-admin/Now, some pages are trying to draw on theme elements like:
http://www.domain.com/pr3ss/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
http://www.domain.com/pr3ss/wp-content/themes/bestpracticegroup/images/column_wrapper_bg.pngAnd are naturally being blocked (not that this seems to affect the way pages are rendering in Google's eyes)
A good SEO friend of mine has suggested allowing the theme folder, and any sub folders where this becomes an issue.
What are your thoughts? Is it even worth disallowing the /pr3ss/wp-admin/ path?
Cheers guys and gals!
All the best,
John.
I've found a couple of the theme's
-
On a side note, if you don't want hackers to find the wp-admin folder, you may not want to put the folder in the robots.txt file, as this is publicly accessible and it will make it easy to find (although it may not be an issue for automatic attacks).
-
Hello John,
I don't understand how blocking /wp-admin/ would keep /wp-content/ from being accessed and rendered by Google.
Google doesn't need to see anything in the /wp-admin/ folder so you should keep it blocked. They do need to see the /wp-content/ folder though.
-
It is either or really. Its not hard to tell that a site is running wordpress, it is pretty hard to hide. At the same time the admin directory does not have any public facing files for non-logged in users as well. I just use a good Wordpress security plugin, good server practices and leave it at that.
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
-
Does order of site: URLs denote anything of great importance?
Howdy! Whilst looking through a few clients via the 'site:' function i've noticed that the order of pages can sometimes begin with the homepage and follow the hierarchy that is laid out on the site. However, there are instances where the top page of the 'site:' search will be a sub-page and not the home page. My question is, does this order of pages denote anything of importance? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corbec8880 -
Importance of Unique Content Location in Source Code
How much does Google value placement of unique content in the source code vs where it is visually displayed? I have a case where my unqiue content visually displays high on page for the user, but in the source code the unique quality content is below duplicate type content that appear across many other domains (think e-commerce category thumbs on left side of screen and 80% right side of screen unique stuff). I have the impression I am at a disadvantage because these pages have the unique / quality content lower in source code. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How to Explain Admin Access To Client Who Denies It to Anyone Inside or Outside?
Hi , I am on a new project for a great prospective client. After a company split the IT dept says, "Our IT Infrastructure team doesn’t provide admin access to anyone (internal or external) to any of our servers/sites for security, maintainability, and quality reasons. We would be more than happy to install and configure any software you would like and provide you read access to any output you might need." I am not aware of any such software. Or what help "read only access" is to getting tasks accomplished. Tomorrow am I meet with four others on the project that I am to assign SEO tasks to. Everyone wonders how to accomplish marketing tasks, web redesign and SEO tasks efficiently? They are told to drop by new content on a backupn CD. My contact has asked that I am permitted access... what can one do when IT says "no?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jessential0 -
Order of importance
Hi, From the screenshot below I have signed up to "Plan 1". I am not happy with the company and think I can do this better myself using SEOMoz. My questions are. Ignoring the one off tasks listed. Which of the Monthly tasks is the most important, which is the second most important etc? Is there any that can be ignored or are any now detrimental to SEO? Is there anything that is not on the list that maybe there should be? In summary I am trying to workout how hard and how much time and effort it will take to go it alone using SEOMoz for guidance? Inline images 1 In case the screenshot doesn't show, below is the Monthly tasks I get on my Plan. 5 x Themed Link Building (min PR2) 10 x Directory Submissions 4 x Blogs 250 words Content Copywriting 1 x Article syndicated 50 times Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Redirecting site from html/php to wordpress
I've never come across this and haven't been able to really find anything that explains it very well. I want to get opinions before we make a definitive decision. Here's the scenario... I am working on a site that was built in HTML/PHP and some of the pages are ranking pretty well. (some page 1, but not number 1) We are going to start using the Wordpress platform by year's end. The pages that were built in html have been built a little spammy but they still rank. I just think they are keyword stuffed a little and not very "reader friendly" (I think the last person was spinning content). So, we've built completely new content on our new pages and we've commissioned really good content writers for them. I will be handling the on-page SEO going forward so I know what to do there. My questions are this.... Should I 301 the old pages to the new pages with the better content? (old pages have the .html or .php extensions so www.example.com/keyword.php will become www.example.com/keyword-keyword Is there any negative side to doing this since the content will be completely different then the old pages that are being 301 from. (Keywords are pretty much staying the same with the exception of minor variations. ie, www.example.com/red-cashmere-sweater.php to www.example.com/cashmere-sweater) I ask this because I've moved sites before where I've just changed the location of the same content. I've never done it where the content is changing and so is the URL extension. Thank you in advance for your help and guidance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
How important is it to canonicalize mobile URLs to desktop URLs?
I know many SEO's prefer a stylesheet and single URL, but if you use m.domain.com, do you canonicalize to your desktop URLS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
How important is sticking to an exact keyword?
The latest article I'm writing for my site is "Friends With Benefits Rules"... So the first part of my question is, what does SEOMoz advocate as being the ideal # of times to include the entire key phrase in the article? I know nobody but Google knows for certain, but is 4 (including in H1's etc.) generally considered enough, other than in the page title? Second part is, what is the consensus about how important is it to stick to the exact keyword? For the example I gave, is it just as good to include a comma, E.g. "...friends with benefits, rules..." or a hyphen "Friends with Benefits - Rules for..."? One thing I'm unclear about on this topic is stop words and plurals. I've been told before that Google ignores stop words, but results for searches with or without the word "how," for example produce very different results... Same thing with plurals. In any case, all of the above is assuming that the quality of the content would not be affected in either case...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030