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.
Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
-
Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?
-
Awesome! That did the trick -- thanks for your help. The site is no longer listed
-
Fact is, the robots file alone will never work (the link has a good explanation why - short form: all it does is stop the bots from indexing again).
Best to request removal then wait a few days.
-
Yeah. As of yet, the site has not been de-indexed. We placed the conditional rule in htaccess and are getting different robots.txt files for the domain and subdomain -- so that works. But I've never done this before so I don't know how long it's supposed to take?
I'll try to verify via Webmaster Tools to speed up the process. Thanks
-
You should do a remove request in Google Webmaster Tools. You have to first verify the sub-domain then request the removal.
See this post on why the robots file alone won't work...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
-
Awesome. We used your second idea and so far it looks like it is working exactly how we want. Thanks for the idea.
Will report back to confirm that the subdomain has been de-indexed.
-
Option 1 could come with a small performance hit if you have a lot of txt files being used on the server.
There shouldn't be any negative side effects to option 2 if the rewrite is clean (IE not accidently a redirect) and the content of the two files are robots compliant.
Good luck
-
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely have to do a bit more research into this one to make sure that it doesn't have any negative side effects before implementation
-
We have a plugin right now that places canonical tags, but unfortunately, the canonical for the subdomain points to the subdomain. I'll look around to see if I can tweak the settings
-
Sounds like (from other discussions) you may be stuck requiring a dynamic robot.txt file which detects what domain the bot is on and changes the content accordingly. This means the server has to run all .txt file as (I presume) PHP.
Or, you could conditionally rewrite the /robot.txt URL to a new file according to sub-domain
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.website.com$
RewriteRule ^robotx.txt$ robots-subdomain.txtThen add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /to the robots-subdomain.txt file
(untested)
-
Placing canonical tags isn't an option? Detect that the page is being viewed through the subdomain, and if so, write the canonical tag on the page back to the root domain?
Or, just place a canonical tag on every page pointing back to the root domain (so the subdomain and root domain pages would both have them). Apparently, it's ok to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself. I haven't tried this, but if Matt Cutts says it's ok...
-
Hey Ryan,
I wasn't directly involved with the decision to create the subdomain, but I'm told that it is necessary to create in order to bypass certain elements that were affecting the root domain.
Nevertheless, it is a blog and the users now need to login to the subdomain in order to access the Wordpress backend to bypass those elements. Traffic for the site still goes to the root domain.
-
They both point to the same location on the server? So there's not a different folder for the subdomain?
If that's the case then I suggest adding a rule to your htaccess file to 301 the subdomain back to the main domain in exactly the same way people redirect from non-www to www or vice-versa. However, you should ask why the server is configured to have a duplicate subdomain? You might just edit your apache settings to get rid of that subdomain (usually done through a cpanel interface).
Here is what your htaccess might look like:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect non-www to wwww
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> -
Not to me LOL I think you'll need someone with a bit more expertise in this area than I to assist in this case. Kyle, I'm sorry I couldn't offer more assistance... but I don't want to tell you something if I'm not 100% sure. I suspect one of the many bright SEOmozer's will quickly come to the rescue on this one.
Andy
-
Hey Andy,
Herein lies the problem. Since the domain and subdomain point to the exact same place, they both utilize the same robots.txt file.
Does that make sense?
-
Hi Kyle Yes, you can block an entire subdomain via robots.txt, however you'll need to create a robots.txt file and place it in the root of the subdomain, then add the code to direct the bots to stay away from the entire subdomain's content.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /hope this helps
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
-
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?
One of my clients has about 40 franchisees who are going to have their own sites on a WordPress multisite installation. The question they're wondering: should these be on subdirectories (thesite.com/this-franchise) or on subdomains (this-franchise.thesite.com)? Which is best for SEO? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ideasandpixels0 -
Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains
I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
weddingsbarcelona.com
surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!0 -
Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
Hello, I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links. I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000! Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000. This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Turning off a subdomain
Hi! I'm currently working with http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/. They have a previous version of the site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com, as sub domain on their site. I've noticed a whole bunch of indexing issues which I think are caused by this. The v1 site has several thousand pages and ranks organically for a number of terms, but the pages are not relevant for the business at this time. The main site has just over 100 pages. More than 28,400 urls are currently indexed. We are considering turning off the v1 site and noindexing it. There are no real backlinks to it. The only worry is that by removing it, it will be seen as a massive drop in content. Rankings for the main site are currently quite poor, despite good content, a decent link profile and high domain authority. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0