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.
Robots.txt blocked internal resources Wordpress
-
Hi all,
We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted. I've created the following new one:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.phpHowever, in the site audit on SemRush, I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts.
Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO?
Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index?
Thanks for your thoughts!
-
Thanks for the answer!
Last question: is /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php an important part that has to be crawled? I found this explanation: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/190993/why-use-admin-ajax-php-and-how-does-it-work/191073#191073
However, on this specific website there is no html at all when I check the source code, only one line with 0 on it.
-
I would leave all the disallows out except for the /wp-admin/ section. For example, I'd rewrite the robots.txt file to read:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/Also, you kind of want Google to index your cached content. In the event your servers go down it will still be able to make your content available.
I hope that helps. Let me know how that works out for you!
-
Thanks for the clear answer.
I've changed the robots.txt to:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.phpThis should avoid problems with not indexing (parts of) cached content.
Or should I leave all the Disallows out?
-
Hey there --
Blocking resources with the robots.txt file prevents search engines from crawling content the no-index tag would be better suited for preventing content from being indexed.
However, previous best practice would dictate blocking access to /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ directories, etc but that's no longer necessary.
Today, Google will fetch all your styling and JavaScript files so they can render your pages completely. Search engines now try to understand your page's layout and presentation as a key part of how they evaluate quality.
So, yeah this might have some impact on your SEO.
Also, if you're using a plugin to cache content you should want Google to crawl your cache content. And in my experience, Googlebot does a good job of not indexing /wp-content/ sections.
So, for your example page, https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js it shouldn't end up in their index.
Hope this helps some.
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
-
Remove Product & Category from URLS in Wordpress
Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please. https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file
I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it? So something like /_Q1. Will that pickup and block every URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1. So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo1234560