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        4. Robots.txt on subdomains

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        • Whittie
          Whittie last edited by

          Hi guys!

          I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Whittie
            Whittie @RyanPurkey last edited by

            That's about as comprehensive an answer as I could have hoped for. Thanks Ryan, really appreciated.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • RyanPurkey
              RyanPurkey last edited by

              Mostly no.  I say 'mostly' because a lot of times when you look at a site using www and no-www if both of those work they're almost always pulling files from the same location (hence the warnings around duplicate content), so both www.domain.com/robots.txt and domain.com/robots.txt are going to work.  This is the dominant example of a subdomain sharing a robots.txt file. However, on domains that are set up as their own subdomains they have different robots.txt.  Take a look at the many differences between subdomain1-1000.wordpress.com/robots.txt vs wordpress.com/robots.txt.  If you set up a subdomain that isn't just a reflection of your root domain, then you'll need to create a robots.txt file as well. Cheers!

              Whittie 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
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