Best way to create robots.txt for my website
-
How I can create robots.txt file for my website guitarcontrol.com ?
It is having login and Guitar lessons.
-
Hi,
First you need to understand your website need, you have to decide which part of your website should not be indexed or crawled by SE bots, like your website provides user login and user areas, if you are providing private dashboard for your user then it should be blocked by robots.txt (or you can use meta tag to prevent robots from crawling and indexing your particular page like ) or you can learn more about robots.txt here https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
Hope it helps
-
I see that you're on WordPress.
This CMS create "virtual" robots.txt. You can see this here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_OptimizationBut on your website there is error in robots.txt and you should see in web server log files (access and error) why this is happening. Also you may need looking .htaccess because something preventing this text file to be accessed.
There is alternative way for using robots.txt in WordPress. All you need is to create new and blank robots.txt in same folder and put this there:
User-agent: *
Disallow:Then save file and that's all. Now bad news - WP can't control indexing and crawling anymore.
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 Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net0 -
Robots.txt Download vs Cache
We made an update to the Robots.txt file this morning after the initial download of the robots.txt file. I then submitted the page through Fetch as Google bot to get the changes in asap. The cache time stamp on the page now shows Sep 27, 2013 15:35:28 GMT. I believe that would put the cache time stamp at about 6 hours ago. However the Blocked URLs tab in Google WMT shows the robots.txt last downloaded at 14 hours ago - and therefore it's showing the old file. This leads me to believe for the Robots.txt the cache date and the download time are independent. Is there anyway to get Google to recognize the new file other than waiting this out??
Technical SEO | | Rich_A0 -
Best way to implement noindex tags on archived blogs
Hi, I have approximately 100 old blogs that I believe are of interest to web browsers that I'd potentially like to noindex due to the fact that they may be viewed poorly by Google, but I'd like to keep on our website. A lot of the content in the blogs is similar to one another (as we blog about the same topics quite often), which is why I believe it may be in our interests to noindex older blogs that we have newer content for on more recent blogs. Firstly does that sound like a good idea? Secondly, can I use Google Tag Manager to implement noindex tags on specific blog pages? It's a hassle to get the webmaster to add in the code, and I've found no mention of whether you can implement such tags on Tag Manager on the usual SEO blogs. Or is there a better way to implement noindex tags en masse? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TheCarnage0 -
Blocked URL's by robots.txt
In Google Webmaster Tools shows me 10,936 Blocked URL's by robots.txt and it is very strange when you go to the "Index Status" section where shows that since April 2012 robots.txt blocked many URL's. You can see more precise on the image attached (chart WMT) I can not explain why I have blocked URL's ? because I have nothing in robots.txt.
Technical SEO | | meralucian37
My robots.txt is like this: User-agent: * I thought I was penalized by Penguin in April 2012 because constantly i'am losing visitors now reaching over 40%. It may be a different penalty? Any help is welcome because i'm already so saturated. Mera robotstxt.jpg0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0