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. Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL

    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.

    Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    6
    1861
    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.
    • EvansHunt
      EvansHunt Subscriber last edited by

      Hey All,

      So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it?

      We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all.

      In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt

      Disallow: /*&viagra

      Disallow: /*&Viagra

      I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious.

      Thanks!

      Jon

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • EvansHunt
        EvansHunt Subscriber @ThompsonPaul last edited by

        Hey Paul,

        Great answer, for some reason it totally slipped my mind that robots.txt is a crawling directive and not an index one. Yes the pages return a 404 on the headers. I've grabbed a copy of the complete SERPS and will now manually disallow them.

        Thanks!

        Jon

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • ThompsonPaul
          ThompsonPaul @ThompsonPaul last edited by

          Thank for the endorsement, Christy! Funny, I only just now saw Rand's recent WBF related to this topic, but pleased to see my answer lines up exactly with his info. 🙂

          P.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • ThompsonPaul
            ThompsonPaul last edited by

            You need to be aware, Jonathan, that there is absolutely nothing about a robots.txt disallow that will help remove a URL from the search engine indexes. Robots is a crawling directive, NOT an indexing directive. In fact, in most cases, blocking URLs in robots.txt will actually cause them to remain in the index even longer.

            I'm assuming you have cleaned up the site so the actual spam URLs no longer resolve. Those URLs should now result in a 404 error page. You must confirm they are actually returning the correct 404 code in the headers. As long as this is the case, it is a matter of waiting while the search engines crawl the spam URLs often enough to recognise they are really gone and remove them from the index. The problem with adding them to the robots.txt is that is actually telling the search engines NOT to crawl them, so they are unlikely to discover that they lead to 404s, hence they may remain in the index even longer.

            Unfortunately you can't use a no-index tag on the offending pages, because the pages should no longer exist on the site. I don't think even a careful implementation of a X-Robots noindex directive in htaccess would work, because the URLs should be resulting in a 404.

            Make certain the problem URLs return a clean 404, use the Google Search Console Remove URLs tool for as many of them as you can (for example you can request removal for entire directories, if the spam happened to be built that way), and then be patient for the rest. But do NOT block them in robots.txt - you'll just prolong the agony and waste your time.

            Hope that all makes sense?

            Paul

            ThompsonPaul EvansHunt 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • Martijn_Scheijbeler
              Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

              Hi Jon,

              Why not just: Disallow: /viagra

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • LesleyPaone
                LesleyPaone last edited by

                Jon,

                I have never done it with a robots.txt, one easy why that I think you could do it would be on the page level. You could add a noindex nofollow to the page itself.

                You can generate it automatically too and have it fired depending on the url by using a substring search on the url as well. That will get them all for sure.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 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

                • NJ-Keith

                  How important is it to add hyphens between words in URL Permalink Structure?

                  We have an issue with our URL Permalink Structures for dynamically generated pages on our website. As we generated hundreds of pages, it does not automatically Space the Words in the Permalink Structure . For example, if we have a product name  Under Armour Fire Basketball Shoe , it will show up in the url as: "mywebsite.com/underarmourfire-basketballshoe" vs "mywebsite.com/under-armour-fire-basketball-shoe" How important is it that the URL includes these spaces between each word in the permalink?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NJ-Keith
                  0
                • Gabriele_Layoutweb

                  If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                  If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb
                  0
                • Brett-S

                  Link juice through URL parameters

                  Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S
                  0
                • ThomasHarvey

                  Large robots.txt file

                  We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey
                  0
                • Jseddon92

                  Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?

                  Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon92
                  0
                • Seamoose

                  301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs

                  Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose
                  0
                • seo123456

                  Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file

                  I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it?  So something like /_Q1.  Will that pickup and block every  URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1.  So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo123456
                  0
                • Romancing

                  URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important

                  Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing
                  0

                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.