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Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my shop subdomain?
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Hello Mozzers!
Apologies if this question has been asked before, but I couldn't find an answer so here goes...
Currently I have one robots.txt file hosted at https://www.mysitename.org.uk/robots.txt
We host our shop on a separate subdomain https://shop.mysitename.org.uk
Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my subdomain? (Some Google searches are telling me yes and some no and I've become awfully confused!
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Thank you. I want to disallow specific URLs on the subdomain and add the shop sitemap in the robots.txt file. So I'll go ahead and create another!
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You go be fine without one. You only need one if you want to manage that subdmain: add specific xml sitemaps links in robots.txt, cut access to specific folders for that subdomain.
if you don't need any of that - just move forward without one.
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Currently we just have: User-agent: *
I'm in the process of optimising.
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It depends what currently is in your robots.txt. Usually it would be useful to have another one for your subdomain.
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Yes, I would have a seperate robots.txt files.
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