• BBgmoro

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Get found
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
          Moz API

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?

        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.

        Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        3
        5
        7063
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • workathomecareers
          workathomecareers last edited by

          Hi

          My robots file is currently set up as listed below.

          From an SEO point of view is it good to disallow feeds, rss and comments?

          I feel allowing comments would be a good thing because it's new content that may rank in the search engines as the comments left on my blog often refer to questions or companies folks are searching for more information on. And the comments are added regularly.

          What's your take? I'm also concerned about the /page being blocked. Not sure how that benefits my blog from an SEO point of view as well. Look forward to your feedback.

          Thanks.

          Eddy

          User-agent: Googlebot
          Crawl-delay: 10
          Allow: /*
          
          User-agent: *
          Crawl-delay: 10
          Disallow: /wp-
          Disallow: /feed/
          Disallow: /trackback/
          Disallow: /rss/
          Disallow: /comments/feed/
          Disallow: /page/
          Disallow: /date/
          Disallow: /comments/
          
          # Allow Everything
          Allow: /*
          
          
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • FedeEinhorn
            FedeEinhorn @workathomecareers last edited by

            If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines.

            Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps.

            Give it a try, you can always disable plugins 🙂

            Wish you the best!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • DaveSottimano
              DaveSottimano @workathomecareers last edited by

              Wordpress is a funny platform, you would think that there isn't much to disallow but there probably is quite a bit.  I agree with Federico - you should allow comments, feed, and rss.

              I'm not going to make blind assumptions here, so you should check your log files to see what's being constantly crawled, feel free to read this http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/server-log-essentials-for-seo.

              FYI - This is a big job. Shout if you need help.

              P.S - Hostgator's Cpanel will allow you to archive raw server logs, make sure you check that option from now on or they'll be overwritten!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • workathomecareers
                workathomecareers @FedeEinhorn last edited by

                Thanks for the info!

                I contacted Hostgator to fix the robots file because it had been blocking Google's bot for some time now. So that's the robot file they uploaded.

                Yes I use wordpress, and apparently some stupid plugin had originally blocked google before hostgator fixed the robots file yesterday.

                So to confirm you don't think anything else should be disallowed except for the /wp-admin directory. With the feeds, comments, etc, there isn't any SEO concerns like duplicate content or anything else that may work against me that should be blocked.

                Is this safe to assume?

                Thanks again!

                Eddy

                DaveSottimano FedeEinhorn 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • FedeEinhorn
                  FedeEinhorn last edited by

                  Who wrote that robots.txt?

                  You shouldn't disallow the comments, or feed or almost anything.

                  I notice you are using wordpress, so if you just want to avoid the admin being indexed (which will isn't going to be as Google does not have access anyway), your robots.txt should look like this:

                  User-Agent:*

                  Disallow: /wp-admin/

                  That's it.

                  workathomecareers 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • ThomasHarvey

                    Large robots.txt file

                    We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey
                    0
                  • jmorehouse

                    Should I disallow all URL query strings/parameters in Robots.txt?

                    Webmaster Tools correctly identifies the query strings/parameters used in my URLs, but still reports duplicate title tags and meta descriptions for the original URL and the versions with parameters. For example, Webmaster Tools would report duplicates for the following URLs, despite it correctly identifying the "cat_id" and "kw" parameters: /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM
                    /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?cat_id=87
                    /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?kw=CROM Additionally, theses pages have self-referential canonical tags, so I would think I'd be covered, but I recently read that another Mozzer saw a great improvement after disallowing all query/parameter URLs, despite Webmaster Tools not reporting any errors. As I see it, I have two options: Manually tell Google that these parameters have no effect on page content via the URL Parameters section in Webmaster Tools (in case Google is unable to automatically detect this, and I am being penalized as a result). Add "Disallow: *?" to hide all query/parameter URLs from Google. My concern here is that most backlinks include the parameters, and in some cases these parameter URLs outrank the original. Any thoughts?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse
                    0
                  • ntcma

                    Should I use meta noindex and robots.txt disallow?

                    Hi, we have an alternate "list view" version of every one of our search results pages The list view has its own URL, indicated by a URL parameter I'm concerned about wasting our crawl budget on all these list view pages, which effectively doubles the amount of pages that need crawling When they were first launched, I had the noindex meta tag be placed on all list view pages, but I'm concerned that they are still being crawled Should I therefore go ahead and also apply a robots.txt disallow on that parameter to ensure that no crawling occurs? Or, will Googlebot/Bingbot also stop crawling that page over time? I assume that noindex still means "crawl"... Thanks 🙂

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma
                    0
                  • Milian

                    Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?

                    Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
                    /fish.html
                    /fish/salmon.html
                    /fishheads
                    /fishheads/yummy.html
                    /fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
                    en/fish.html
                    en/fish/salmon.html
                    en/fishheads
                    en/fishheads/yummy.html
                    **en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
                    http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
                    http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
                    http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
                    0
                  • IHSwebsite

                    Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?

                    We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite
                    0
                  • nicole.healthline

                    Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?

                    We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                    4
                  • HD_Leona

                    Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search

                    Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos.  When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed.  The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such:  domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results.  This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can  I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent:  * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos?  I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona
                    0
                  • seo123456

                    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 | | seo123456
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.