Using one robots.txt for two websites
-
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemapIs this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
-
Hi @gpainter,
Thanks for your help. I can't see anything specific in that link that says you can't have two sitemaps in one robots.txt. Where it mentions the sitemap it does say "You can specify multiple sitemap fields", although I'm not sure whether this means having multiple sitemap URLs under one mention of 'sitemap'?
-
@ciehmoz Hey I've replied to the other thread too.
The best case here will be to utilize different robots.txt files for both the websites.
You could've used the same robots.txt file only if the other site was on the same subdomain.
Don't forget to include the corresponding sitemaps to the new robots.txt file, hope this works out, cheers.
-
Hey @ciehmoz
Just replied to your other thread, you will need one robot.txt per site. Referring to two sitemaps in one robots.txt will confuse Google.
Info here - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_txt
Good Luck
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
-
How can I make it so that robots.txt is not ignored due to a URL re-direct?
Recently a site moved from blog.site.com to site.com/blog with an instruction like this one: /etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:94: ProxyPass /blog http://blog.site.com
Technical SEO | | rodelmo4
/etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:95: ProxyPassReverse /blog http://blog.site.com It's a Wordpress.org blog that was set as a subdomain, and now is being redirected to look like a directory. That said, the robots.txt file seems to be ignored by Google bot. There is a Disallow: /tag/ on that file to avoid "duplicate content" on the site. I have tried this before with other Wordpress subdomains and works like a charm, except for this time, in which the blog is rendered as a subdirectory. Any ideas why? Thanks!0 -
Google lists eBay.au number one for vertical garden and their sellers are using my IMAGES
Is there anyway of getting Google to slap eBay with a loss of page rank ? eBay.au has number one position for vertical garden in google.com.au. (search 9000). Fair enough I suppose because they are delivering a huge range of vertical garden products BUT the sellers are using images for their products that are not showing their products. Most of the sellers are flogging China copies - and I mean these are really bad copies. But what angers me even more is some of their top sellers are using MY IMAGES. They have taken my images used on a UK website and have reused them in AUstralia. Sellers have even rebranded my images. GRRRRR Is there some international sin bin where I can name and shame? Does Google care about such matters?
Technical SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
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 -
Robots.txt and joomla
Hello, I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address )
and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage ( is that useful )
as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful ) any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ? Thank you,0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Warnings for blocked by blocked by meta-robots/meta robots Nofollow...how to resolve?
Hello, I see hundreds of notices for blocked by meta-robots/meta robots nofollow and it appears it is linked to the comments on my site which I assume I would not want to be crawled. Is this the case and these notices are actually a positive thing? Please advise how to clear them up if these notices can be potentially harmful for my SEO. Thanks, Talia
Technical SEO | | M80Marketing0 -
I use All in one SEO pack for wordpress and i i have 2 meta tags i need to delete them is this the meta description tag ?
add_option("aiosp_post_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_page_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Post Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_home_meta_tags", '', 'All in One SEO Plugin Additional Home Meta Tags', 'yes'); add_option("aiosp_do_log", null, 'All in One SEO Plugin write log file', 'yes'); */
Technical SEO | | fhnhockey0880