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.
Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my shop subdomain?
-
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!
-
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!
-
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.
-
Currently we just have: User-agent: *
I'm in the process of optimising.
-
It depends what currently is in your robots.txt. Usually it would be useful to have another one for your subdomain.
-
Yes, I would have a seperate robots.txt files.
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
-
Role of Robots.txt and Search Console parameters settings
Hi, wondering if anyone can point me to resources or explain the difference between these two. If a site has url parameters disallowed in Robots.txt is it redundant to edit settings in Search Console parameters to anything other than "Let Googlebot Decide"?
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
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 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?
Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com
Technical SEO | | Webmaster1230 -
Duplicate content problem from an index.php file
Hi One of my sites is flagging a duplicate content problem which is affecting the search rankings. The duplicate problem is caused by http://www.mydomain.com/index.php which has a page rank of 26 How can I sort the duplicate content problem, as the main page should just be http://www.mydomain.com which has a page rank of 42 and is the stronger page with stronger links etc Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0