Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
-
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live.
My specific situation is this:
I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content.
Should I:
a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense)
b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning...
Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
-
Here's how I dealt with a similar situation in the past.
Robots.txt on each of the dev subdomains and on the live domain. Dev subdomains robots.txt excluded the entire subdomain, and subdomains were verified in GWT and removed as needed.
Made live subdomain robots.txt read-only so it didn't get overwritten. Should have made dev subdomains robots.txt read-only as well, since they sometimes got refreshed with the live content (there was a UGC database that would occasionally get copied to a dev subdomain, and we'd have robots.txt get copied over too and dev subdomain indexed).
Set up a code monitor that checks the contents of all of the robots.txt daily and sends me an email if anything is changed.
Not perfect, but I was at least able to catch changes soon after they happened, and prevented a few changes.
-
you can't put logic in robots.txt and subdomains are seen as different sites, so you need to create separate robots.txt files for each subdomain and block them in their respective robots.txt files.
You'll need to also add the Google verification code and verify them, then in GWMT you can request to have the subdomain removed from Googles index, that's the fastest way.
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
-
Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal
Hi There, I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me. Here we go, We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues. We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened: a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site. b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore. We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP. We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages. Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Removing extension
Hi there, I have thousands of pages that use the extension .php and thought about cleaning these URLs up for example rather than www.mysite.com/trainers/adidias/samba.php I could have have www.mysite.com/trainers/adidas/samba/ is it worth changing? Currently driving around 1 million visits to the website each month from organic search and slightly concerned it could have a negative impact on my rankings. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
HTTP Status showing up in opensiteexplorer top pages as blocked by robot.txt file
I am trying to find an answer to this question it has alot of url on this page with no data when i go into the data source and search for noindex or robot.txt but the site is visible in the search engines ?
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve0 -
"Extremely high number of URLs" warning for robots.txt blocked pages
I have a section of my site that is exclusively for tracking redirects for paid ads. All URLs under this path do a 302 redirect through our ad tracking system: http://www.mysite.com/trackingredirect/blue-widgets?ad_id=1234567 --302--> http://www.mysite.com/blue-widgets This path of the site is blocked by our robots.txt, and none of the pages show up for a site: search. User-agent: * Disallow: /trackingredirect However, I keep receiving messages in Google Webmaster Tools about an "extremely high number of URLs", and the URLs listed are in my redirect directory, which is ostensibly not indexed. If not by robots.txt, how can I keep Googlebot from wasting crawl time on these millions of /trackingredirect/ links?
Technical SEO | | EhrenReilly0 -
Meta-robots Nofollow
I don't understand Meta-robots Nofollow. Wordpress has my homepage set to this according to SEOMoz tool. Is this really bad?
Technical SEO | | hopkinspat1 -
Allow or Disallow First in Robots.txt
If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command? example: Allow: /models/ford///page* Disallow: /models////page
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Robots.txt question
Hello, What does the following command mean - User-agent: * Allow: / Does it mean that we are blocking all spiders ? Is Allow supported in robots.txt ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050
