Robots.txt
-
Hi All
Having a robots.txt looking like the below will this stop Google crawling the site
User-agent: *
-
If that is the only line in your robots.txt file then it really shouldn't accomplish anything. It's like saying, "Hey...all search engines...take note of this....oh forget it, there's nothing to see here."
I agree with Dave...try to fetch the page in Webmaster tools (Google Search Console). You can also use the Webmaster Tools robots.txt tester which often will tell you if there are issues.
- Hi this is what we thought but Google has not indexed any pages
How old is the site? It can take weeks for a new site to get indexed and then to get ranked as well. Do you see any pages on a site: search for your domain? (i.e. site:example.com). This might sound silly, but are you sure that there is no noindex tag on the page?
-
Via Search Console try to "Fetch As Google" and assuming that works without errors use the submit function. You'll know very quickly whether you've got technical issues and get the page into the index very quickly.
-
Hey, throw us a link to your robots.txt file and we can take a look, probably tell you pretty quickly. Without seeing it, we're all pretty much just taking guesses.
-
David's spot on. The User-agent: * mean this section applies to all robots. If you want Google (or any robot) to index your whole site, no need for a robots.txt file.
-
From your original post I presumed you had not wanted Google to index your pages?
If you want Google to index your pages it can take some time to happen naturally. You might want to submit a sitemap and ask Google to crawl your site within Webmaster Tools.
Robots.txt is normally only used to block crawlers, so you will not need to put any code in there for it to allow Google to crawl.
-
Hi this is what we thought but Google has not indexed any pages
-
Wouldn't have thought so, you'd need to include this line of code as well:
Disallow: /
That will stop anything from crawling the site.
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
I'm getting an error in Search Console that pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. Unfortunately I can't post images on here but I've linked some url's below. The page below in search console shows the error above... https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/ As does this one. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/independent-school-marketing-communications/ However, this page does not have the error and is indexed by Google. The meta robots tag looks identical. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/blog/leadership-team/jill-goodman/ Any and all help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
How can I make it so that robots.txt is not ignored due to a URL re-direct?
Recently a site moved from blog.site.com to site.com/blog with an instruction like this one: /etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:94: ProxyPass /blog http://blog.site.com
Technical SEO | | rodelmo4
/etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:95: ProxyPassReverse /blog http://blog.site.com It's a Wordpress.org blog that was set as a subdomain, and now is being redirected to look like a directory. That said, the robots.txt file seems to be ignored by Google bot. There is a Disallow: /tag/ on that file to avoid "duplicate content" on the site. I have tried this before with other Wordpress subdomains and works like a charm, except for this time, in which the blog is rendered as a subdirectory. Any ideas why? Thanks!0 -
Is there a limit to how many URLs you can put in a robots.txt file?
We have a site that has way too many urls caused by our crawlable faceted navigation. We are trying to purge 90% of our urls from the indexes. We put no index tags on the url combinations that we do no want indexed anymore, but it is taking google way too long to find the no index tags. Meanwhile we are getting hit with excessive url warnings and have been it by Panda. Would it help speed the process of purging urls if we added the urls to the robots.txt file? Could this cause any issues for us? Could it have the opposite effect and block the crawler from finding the urls, but not purge them from the index? The list could be in excess of 100MM urls.
Technical SEO | | kcb81780 -
Easy Question: regarding no index meta tag vs robot.txt
This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea? I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best. **DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them? If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right? ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option? **301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think? DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Are robots.txt wildcards still valid? If so, what is the proper syntax for setting this up?
I've got several URL's that I need to disallow in my robots.txt file. For example, I've got several documents that I don't want indexed and filters that are getting flagged as duplicate content. Rather than typing in thousands of URL's I was hoping that wildcards were still valid.
Technical SEO | | mkhGT0 -
Robots.txt best practices & tips
Hey, I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on whether I should block the robots.txt file from the average user (not from googlebot, yandex, etc)? If so, how would I go about doing this? With .htaccess I'm guessing - but not an expert. What can people do with the information in the file? Maybe someone can give me some "best practices"? (I have a wordpress based website) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
Using robots.txt to deal with duplicate content
I have 2 sites with duplicate content issues. One is a wordpress blog. The other is a store (Pinnacle Cart). I cannot edit the canonical tag on either site. In this case, should I use robots.txt to eliminate the duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Robots.txt
My campaign hse24 (www.hse24.de) is not being crawled any more ... Do you think this can be a problem of the robots.txt? I always thought that Google and friends are interpretating the file correct, seen that he site was crawled since last week. Thanks a lot Bernd NB: Here is the robots.txt: User-Agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: Googlebot-Image User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile User-agent: MSNBot User-agent: Slurp User-agent: yahoo-mmcrawler User-agent: psbot Disallow: /is-bin/ Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/ Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/Root%20Edition/units/HSE24/Beratung/
Technical SEO | | remino630