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.
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
-
Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs
I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
Technical SEO | | btreloar
Disallow: ?Page=
Disallow: ?Page=*
Disallow: ?Page=
Or something else?0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Bulk URL Removal in Webmaster Tools
One of Wordpress sites was hacked (for about 10 hours), and Google picked up 4000+ urls in the index. The site is fixed, but I'm stuck with all those urls in the index. All the urls of of the form: walkerorthodontics.com/index.php?online-payday-cash-loan.htmloncewe The only bulk removal option I could find was to remove an entire folder, but I can't do that, as it would only leave the homepage and kill off everything else. For some crazy reason, the removal tools doesn't support wildcards, so that obvious solution is right out. So, how do it get rid of 4000 results? And no, waiting around for them to 404 out of the index isn't an option.
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Does an subdomain hosted offsite provide SEO value
We have a job board hosted through an applicant processing system which we've setup as a subdomain (jobs.ourcompany.com), most of the assets are hosted on our primary domain (ourcompany.com). My question is does having it hosted offsite provide any value? Do we get credit for that content being shared and distributed on the web or does the applicant processing system? As I see it the options are (correct me if I'm wrong): Host the job listings on our primary domain (ourcompany.com/jobs) and have it point to the application on the subdomain. Advertise the job listings pointing to the primary domain on the paid sites. The free job listing sites will automatically point to the sub-domain because the applicant processing system automatically submits them. Host the job listings entirely on the sub-domain applicant tracking system and link to it from our primary site navigation. Advertise the job listings to the sub-domain so that both free and paid point to the same place. Obviously the second one would be much easier just not sure on the technical side of our website getting credit by search engines as the one who has produced the content.
Technical SEO | | r1200gsa0 -
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt
Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg0 -
Does Bing ignore robots txt files?
Bonjour from "Its a miracle is not raining" Wetherby Uk 🙂 Ok here goes... Why despite a robots text file excluding indexing to site http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ is the site url being indexed in Bing bit not Google? Does bing ignore robots text files or is there something missing from http://lewispr.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/robots.txt I need to add to stop bing indexing a preview site as illustrated below. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/preview-bing-indexed.jpg Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Can I Disallow Faceted Nav URLs - Robots.txt
I have been disallowing /*? So I know that works without affecting crawling. I am wondering if I can disallow the faceted nav urls. So disallow: /category.html/? /category2.html/? /category3.html/*? To prevent the price faceted url from being cached: /category.html?price=1%2C1000
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser
and
/category.html?price=1%2C1000&product_material=88 Thanks!0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0