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
-
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Subdomain/subfolder question
Hi community, Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com? I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Temporary Redirect 302 to subdomain for a couple of weeks?
Hi, To prevent DDOS attack during the Olympic Game the admins will use a service call Site Shield by Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/site_shield.html). The thing is that they will have to redirect all the trafic to a subdomain instead of the main one (http://www.website.com instead of http://website.com) and this for a couple of week (no negotiation here, it's too late and they have no choice). Does a 302 will do the job? Will I loose authority? Does adding a canonical URL on every pages of the site removing the www from the URL will help? Should I do something on webmaster tool to help? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | TVFreak0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
SEO credit for subdomain blogs?
One of my clients is currently running a webstore through Volusions. They would like to add a blog to their website, but since Volusions doesn't currently support blogs on the same domain we would have to create a Wordpress blog and link it to a subdomain. (http://support.volusion.com/article/linking-your-blog-your-volusion-store) Using this method, will their primary website receive any SEO credit for the content being created on the blog or will it only count towards the subdomain? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CMSSolutions980 -
How to allow one directory in robots.txt
Hello, is there a way to allow a certain child directory in robots.txt but keep all others blocked? For instance, we've got external links pointing to /user/password/, but we're blocking everything under /user/. And there are too many /user/somethings/ to just block every one BUT /user/password/. I hope that makes sense... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Which is better? Remove folder or fix the links and wait?
Dear Mozers, Recently I added a new language to one of my sites in a new folder (www.site.com/es/) but for some reasons many links got broken or were simply sending to a wrong page. This caused a bad indexing and it also showed a lot of duplicate content. I know how to fix it but my question is this: Is it better to remove the second language folder, fix it and then put it back up after a few months or just fix it now as it is and wait for G to come back and index the new links?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0
