I have two robots.txt pages for www and non-www version. Will that be a problem?
-
There are two robots.txt pages. One for www version and another for non-www version though I have moved to the non-www version.
-
It wont affect your SEO, you just don;t need the the non-https version
-
Hi ramb,
Short answer: No, it won't affect your ability to rank in Google. Unless both sites (non-www and www version) compete for the same search term and one of them isn't blocked in the correspondent robots.txt file.
If you can, make sure to have a redirection rule so as everything in the non-www goes to the www.
It bugs me why aren't you redirecting the complete non-www to the www version.
Two possibilities come to my mind:- You can't redirect the whole non-www due to some app or technical need.
In this case, both versions, if accessible to Google, will be treated as different sites. Thus, you must be sure that both robots file are correct for the given subdomain. - You have a separate website, which contains different content from the www version (this usually happens with subdomains with different page types, such as products.abc.com and categories.abc.com)
In this case, please be sure that you know what you want to be blocked and have each robots.txt file in their subdomain.
Keep in mind that Robots file only controls where you don't want googlebot to access in the public version of your website. When a certain page or group of pages are blocked in robots.txt, google won't access them anymore thus not knowing if that page has what it needs to rank for any given search term. Google might rank lower and users will see a note in search results, leading to a lower CTR.
Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
Gaston - You can't redirect the whole non-www due to some app or technical need.
-
Are you redirecting everything on www to non-www? If so, you don't really need a robots.txt to be served for the www subdomain. Google will ignore the original robots.txt file if it is given a 301 anyway.
-
Hi Gatson
Thank you for your response. Currently, www version of the site is redirected to non-www version, which is the primary(or root) domain.
But the problem is, I have 2 robots.txt files running for the same site. i.e. same robots.txt file loads on both www and non-www version. (Example https://www.abc.com/robots.txt and https://abc.com/robots.txt).
Does it affect my site's SEO ??
Should I redirect www-version of the file to non-www version?
Your feedback will be highly appreciated.Thank you,
R.
-
Hi ramb,
It's totally fine to have different robots.txt files for different subdomains.
Thus said, http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are different subdomains. Consider the one with non-www as the full root domain.In case it is needed, here you have Google's official resource about robots.txt:
Learn about Robots.txt file - Search Console helpHope it helps.
Best luck.
Gast
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
-
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 -
Blocking subdomains with Robots.txt file
We noticed that Google is indexing our pre-production site ibweb.prod.interstatebatteries.com in addition to indexing our main site interstatebatteries.com. Can you all help shed some light on the proper way to no-index our pre-prod site without impacting our live site?
Technical SEO | | paulwatley0 -
Will this URL structure: "domain.com/s/content-title" cause problems?
Hey all, We have a new in-house built too for building content. The problem is it inserts a letter directly after the domain automatically. The content we build with these pages aren't all related, so we could end up with a bunch of urls like this: domain.com/s/some-calculator
Technical SEO | | joshuaboyd
domain.com/s/some-infographic
domain.com/s/some-long-form-blog-post
domain.com/s/some-product-page Could this cause any significant issues down the line?0 -
I hope someone can help me with page indexing problem
I have a problem with all video pages on www.tadibrothers.com.
Technical SEO | | TadiBrothers
I can not understand why google do not index all the video pages?
I never blocked them with the robots.txt file, there are no noindex/nofollow tags on the pages. The only video page that I found in search results is the main video category page: https://www.tadibrothers.com/videos and 1 video page out of 150 videos: https://www.tadibrothers.com/video/front-side-rear-view-cameras-for-backup-camera-systems I hope someone can point me to the right way0 -
Robots.txt file
How do i get Google to stop indexing my old pages and start indexing my new pages even months down the line? Do i need to install a Robots.txt file on each page?
Technical SEO | | gimes0 -
RegEx help needed for robots.txt potential conflict
I've created a robots.txt file for a new Magento install and used an existing site-map that was on the Magento help forums but the trouble is I can't decipher something. It seems that I am allowing and disallowing access to the same expression for pagination. My robots.txt file (and a lot of other Magento site-maps it seems) includes both: Allow: /*?p= and Disallow: /?p=& I've searched for help on RegEx and I can't see what "&" does but it seems to me that I'm allowing crawler access to all pagination URLs, but then possibly disallowing access to all pagination URLs that include anything other than just the page number? I've looked at several resources and there is practically no reference to what "&" does... Can anyone shed any light on this, to ensure I am allowing suitable access to a shop? Thanks in advance for any assistance
Technical SEO | | MSTJames0 -
Restricted by robots.txt does this cause problems?
I have restricted around 1,500 links which are links to retailers website and links that affiliate links accorsing to webmaster tools Is this the right approach as I thought it would affect the link juice? or should I take the no follow out of the restricted by robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Should search pages be disallowed in robots.txt?
The SEOmoz crawler picks up "search" pages on a site as having duplicate page titles, which of course they do. Does that mean I should put a "Disallow: /search" tag in my robots.txt? When I put the URL's into Google, they aren't coming up in any SERPS, so I would assume everything's ok. I try to abide by the SEOmoz crawl errors as much as possible, that's why I'm asking. Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0