How to allow bots to crawl all but WP-content
-
Hello,
I would like my website to remain crawlable to bots, but to block my wp content and media. Does the following robots.txt work? I worry that the * user agent may conflict with the others.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/User-agent: GoogleBot
Allow: /User-agent: GoogleBot-Mobile
Allow: /User-agent: GoogleBot-Image
Allow: /User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /User-agent: Slurp
Allow: / -
Thank you for the help, Gaston!
-
Yeap, with that you are allowing every file ending with that extension
-
Can I do so with:
Allow: *.jpg
Allow: *.png
-
Thanks, Gaston. I should have been more clear about what I am looking to do. I currently am having an indexation issue. Somehow, pages are being automatically generated by WordPress.
These pages are often .txt files of information or code from plugins, all beginning with /wp-content/uploads/ in their URL. I have been manually removing them from the index and would like to now have them be uncrawlable.
Best
-
Oh god, my mistake!
Im deeply sorry, yes, this configuration will block images! that follow that folder structure!I'll correct myself.
Thanks for pointing it out! -
Gaston,
Thanks for the fast reply! My images folder does follow that format, which is what makes me worrisome as we are blocking the wp-conent folder.
Thanks!
-
Hi Tom,
Yes, this config will allow images to be crawled,
No, this config will block images to be crawled,as long as your wordpress has the defalt folder for images: /wp-content/uploads/year/month/image-name.png
How to know, super easy, where your images are stored? Go to the web where you can find an image... Then right clic and then copy link address. With that link you will find that folder structure.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR -
Hi Gaston,
I just wanted to follow up with you with one last question if possible. Would this allow my images and PDF's to be crawled & indexed still?
Thanks!
-
Awesome. Thanks, Gaston!
-
Yes it does.
As I said earlier. Copy and paste that code into the robot.txt tester in any of your search console and try with some name.css or testing.js just for testing.
Check the image i've attached.Hope it helps.
Best luck
GR -
Thank you for the response. I'm still a little uncertain, does the version you wrote allow the bots to crawl the css and js as well?
Best
-
Hi Tom!
That Robots.txt config is pretty redundant.
To acheive what you what, thy this:User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Allow: *.js
Allow: *.cssJust 3 things to note here:
1- That User-agent:* and those disallows blocks for every bot to crawl whats in those folders.
2- When blocking /wp-content/ you are also blocking the /themes/ folder and inside are the .js and .css files. Blocking those files cause to googlebot not being able to render correctly that page and see it different from what a normal user would see.
3- Those Allow:/ dont prevent the disallow.To try that configuration, you can use the robots.txt tester in search console, just inder the Crawl menu.
Remember that by default google considers that you are not blocking nothing.
More info here: The web robots.tat pageHope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics has returned several issues that I'm unsure how to fix. I'm guessing it's a canonical link issue but not entirely sure... Duplicate Page Content/Titles On a website (http://www.smselectronics.co.uk/market-sectors) with 6 market sectors but each pull the same 3 pages as child pages - certifications, equipment & case studies. On each products section where the page only shows X amount of items but there are several pages to fit all the products this creates multiple pages. There is also a similar pagination problem with the Blogs (auto generated date titles & user created SEO titles) & News listings. Blog Tags also seem to generate duplicate pages with the same content/titles as the parent page. Are these particularly important for SEO or is it more important to remove the duplication by deleting them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | BBDCreative0 -
Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct. I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings. I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site. I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now. any advice on what i should do would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sitemap and crawl impact
If I have two links in the sitemap (for example: page1.html and page2.html) but the web-site contains more pages (page1.html, page2.html and page3.html) is this a sign for Google to not to crawl other pages? I.e. Will Google index page3.html? Consider that any page can be accessed.
Technical SEO | | ditoroin0 -
Does this content get indexed?
A lot of content on this site is displayed in pop up pages. Eg. Visit the Title page http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title To access the sample report or fee details, the info is shown in a pop up page with a strange url. Example: http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title+-+Fee+Details I can't see any of these pages being indexed in Google or other search engines when I do a site search: http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title+-+Fee+Details Is there a way to get this content indexed besides telling the client to restructure this content?
Technical SEO | | Bigheadigital0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Late loading content via AJAX - impact to bots
Hi, In an attempt to reduce the latency of our site, we are planning on late-loading all content below the fold via AJAX. My concern is Googlebot won't see this content and won't index it properly (our site is very large and we have lots of content). What is good for our users is not necessarily good for bots. Will late loading AJAX content be read by Googlebot? Thoughts on how to balance speed vs search engine crawl-ability?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Entry based content and SEO
My E-commerce team is implementing functionality that allows us to display different content based on what channel and even what keyword the customers used to reach our page. This is of course a move that we believe will strengthen our conversion rates, but how will this effect our organic search listings? Do you guys have any examples of how this could affect us, and are there any technology pitfalls that we absolutely need to know about?
Technical SEO | | GEMoney_No0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0