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Block session id URLs with robots.txt

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

761

Mat_C Subscriber last edited by

Hi,

I would like to block all URLs with the parameter '?filter=' from being crawled by including them in the robots.txt.

Which directive should I use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: ?filter=

or

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?filter=

In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary?

Thanks!
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Mat_C Subscriber @Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the answer. Regarding the forward slash in the beginning, is it necessary to use this?

In the robots text from Zalando for example, you can see that they don't use it for a lot of filters.
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Martijn_Scheijbeler @jasongmcmahon last edited by

Uhh, that's not what the requester is looking for and could actually cause tons of problems if you would apply this on a site that you're unaware of. I would always go with the most limiting robots.txt that you can and in this case, I would go with: /?filter=
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jasongmcmahon last edited by
Hi,

The following should suffice as it will black any URL with a "?" in it
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
```
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