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.
Is sitemap required on my robots.txt?
-
Hi,
I know that linking your sitemap from your robots.txt file is a good practice. Ok, but... may I just send my sitemap to search console and forget about adding ti to my robots.txt?
That's my situation:
- 1 multilang platform which means...
- ... 2 set of pages. One for each lang, of course
- But my CMS (magento) only allows me to have 1 robots.txt file
So, again: may I have a robots.txt file woth no sitemap AND not suffering any potential SEO loss?
Thanks in advance,
Juan Vicente Mañanas Abad
-
Hi Juan,
You should also know that you can have multiple sitemap directives on one robots file. This is common among international sites and large commerce sites.
-
Well including sitemap in robots.txt is good praticle but isn't required. You can add sitemap in SearchConsole (or Bing WMT) and bots will index site again. Even bots can index site w/o sitemap but sitemap helps them.
That's why don't worry. You can edit your robots.txt at anytime and add sitemap if it's possible.
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
-
Sitemap.xml strategy for site with thousands of pages
I have a client that has a HUGE website with thousands of product pages. We don't currently have a sitemap.xml because it would take so much power to map the sitemap. I have thought about creating a sitemap for the key pages on the website - but didn't want to hurt the SEO on the thousands of product pages. If you have a sitemap.xml that only has some of the pages on your site - will it negatively impact the other pages, that Google has indexed - but are not listed on the sitemap.xml.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
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 -
Exclude Child URLs from XML Sitemap Generator (Wordpress)
Hi all, I was recommended the XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress by the very helpful Keith Bloemendaal and John Pring - however I can't seem to exclude child URLs. There is a section Exclude items and a subsection Exclude posts. I have tried inputting the URLs for the pages I don't want in the sitemap, however that didn't work. So I read that you have to include a list of "IDs" - not sure where on earth to find that info, tried the page name and the post= number from the URL, however neither worked. I hope somebody can point me in the right direction - and apologies, I am a Wordpress novice, and I got no answers from the Wordpress forums so turned right back to SEOmoz! Cheers.
Technical SEO | | markadoi840 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
How do you implement pages requiring login?
I'm running a site with a member area and some public accessible pages. The member area obviously requires users to authenticate, while the public pages are indexable by search engines. Our global navigation includes links to the restricted pages. At the moment, when a user isn't logged in and accesses a restricted page, we're 302-redirecting them to a login page. We have a lot of external links pointing to restricted pages (eg. profile pages), and since we're 302-redirecting the juice from these links are lost. I've been thinking about changing the redirect from 302 to 301. How would this look from a search engines view? The pages aren't per se permanently moved - the current user just isn't authenticated to view the content of the page at the moment. Would it be a problem that navigation contains multiple internal links that all 301 redirect to the same login page? Any suggestions? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jonesjitter0 -
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 -
How do I create a Video Sitemap for Youtube Embedded Videos?
I've been seeing a lot of people recommend creating a video sitemap or Media RSS feed (mRSS) and submit to Google. We have videos hosted on Brightcove and most on YouTube. Brightcove can generate the sitemap for us. But does anyone know how to generate a YouTube Video Sitemap for those videos embedded on our pages? Note: I realize I could manually assemble the video sitemap, however manually assembling the sitemap is probably not an option for us due to the volume of videos we've published.
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO1
