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
-
Impact of Medium blog hosted on my subdomain
I am using the Medium blogging platform to blog, but it is pointed to my site and appears at blog.mysite.com. Since the content is hosted on Medium and pointed to my subdomain via an A Record / CNAME / etc... 1. Will my domain get credit for backlinks to the blog content? 2. If Medium changes in the future and no longer points to my subdomain, will I lose all of the backlinks I've built up?
Technical SEO | | davidevans_seo0 -
Images, CSS and Javascript on subdomain or external website
Hi guy's, I came across webshops that put images, CSS and Javascript on different websites or subdomains. Does this boost SEO results? On our Wordpress webshop all the sourcescodes are placed after our own domainname: www.ourdomainname.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.11.3'
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
www.ourdomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/example.jpg Examples of other website: Website 1:
https://www.zalando.nl/heren-home/ Sourcecode:
https://secure-i3.ztat.net//camp/03/d5/1a0168ac81f2ffb010803d108221.jpg
https://secure-media.ztat.net/media/cms/adproduct/ad-product.min.css?_=1447764579000 Website 2:
https://www.bol.com/nl/index.html Sourcecode:
https://s.s-bol.com/nl/static/css/main/webselfservice.1358897755.css
//s.s-bol.com/nl/upload/images/logos/bol-logo-500500.jpg Website 3:
http://www.wehkamp.nl/ Sourcecode:
https://static.wehkamp.nl/assets/styles/themes/wehkamp.color.min.css?v=f47bf1
http://assets.wehkamp.com/i/wehkamp/350-450-layer-SDD-wk51-v3.jpg0 -
Should I block Map pages with robots.txt?
Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Technical SEO | | imaginex0 -
How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?
Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?
Technical SEO | | renukishor4 -
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps
Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0