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.
Multiple robots.txt files on server
-
Hi!
I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step.
One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names:
robots.txt (original dupplicate)
robots.txt-Original (original)
robots.txt-NEW (other content)
robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate)Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!
-
So what's the best policy if a site uses an e-commerce platform like Magento, which has a robots file, but also has a Wordpress blog installed to another folder. eg: /blog and uses a plugin like YOAST which generated a robots file of the Wordpress installation.
Then you have 2 robots files, is this detrimental or no big deal?
-
Thanks very much for the help!
-
Thanks very much for the help!
-
Keep a backup and remove them.
Search engines are only going to look at the file which is exactly called robots.txt variations of file name will be ignored.
Do make sure the entries are correct in the main one though, you don't want Google crawling admin pages or other confidential areas of the site.
-
Hi, thanks for the answer and help!
Well, I only have one domain that has a webpage and no subdomains active (no blog-subdomain or similar) - so how can I configure that to the situation? Can I just remove all and upload the one I want, maybe?
-
That's a good question, EMS. The robots.txt protocol can get kind of
confusing when you think about it too long, and it sounds like you've
thought about this a bit. However, in this case, it might help to
look at robots.txt from the perspective of the spider.When a spider finds a URL, it takes the whole domain name (everything
between 'http://' and the next '/'), then sticks a '/robots.txt' on
the end of it and looks for that file. If that file exists, then the
spider should read it to see where it is allowed to crawl.In your case, Googlebot, or any other spider, should try to access
three URLs: domainA.com/robots.txt, domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt,
and domainB.com/robots.txt. The rules in each are treated as
separate, so disallowing robots from domainA.com/ should result in
domainA.com/ being removed from search results while
domainB.domainA.com/ remains unaffected, which does not sound like not
something you want.The problem you might have with the setup you have described is this--
in order to keep domainB.domainA.com out of the results, you would
need to have domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt exclude robots, while
domainB.com/robots.txt welcomes them. This means that you would need
to have a way to make domainB.domainA.com/ and domainB.com/ serve
different information, and judging from what you've described, you
have not set up your server to do so yet.Of course, it is always possible that I have assumed to much about
your situation, so it is a good idea to use Google's robots.txt
analysis tool (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8475
) to see if your robots.txt files already produce the results you
want.If using robots.txt files doesn't solve the problem, and assuming that
you want to continue hosting all of your content on domainA.com, one
strategy you really should look into would be setting up a 301
redirect from the pages on domainB.domainA.com/ to domainB.com/ . If
you need more advice on how to do this with your server software, your
hosting company's tech support would definitely be the best place to
start, but this group is here to help if more isues arise.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Log in, sign up, user registration and robots
Hi all, We have an accommodation site that asks users only to register when they want to book a room, in the last step. Though this is the ideal situation when you have tons of users, nowadays we are having around 1500 - 2000 per day and making tests we found out that if we ask for a registration (simple, 1 click FB) we mail them all and through a good customer service we are increasing our sales. That is why, we would like to ask users to register right after the home page ie Home/accommodation or and all the rest. I am not sure how can I make to make that content still visible to robots.
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
Will the authentication process block google crawling it? Maybe something we can do? We are not completely sure how to proceed so any tip would be appreciated. Thank you all for answering.3 -
Handling Multiple Restaurants Under One Domain
We are working with a client that has 2 different restaurants. One has been established since 1938, the other was opened in late 2012. Currently, each site has its own domain name. From a marketing/branding perspective, we would like to make the customers [web visitors] of the established restaurant aware of the sister restaurant. To accomplish this, we are thinking about creating a landing page that links to each restaurant. To do this, we would need to purchase a brand new URL, and then place each restaurant in a separate sub folder of the new URL. The other thought is to have each site accessed from the main new URL [within sub folders] and also point each existing URL to the appropriate sub folder for each restaurant. We know there are some branding and marketing hurdles with this approach that we need to think through/work out. But, we are not sure how this would impact their SEO––and assume it will not be good. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
Are robots.txt wildcards still valid? If so, what is the proper syntax for setting this up?
I've got several URL's that I need to disallow in my robots.txt file. For example, I've got several documents that I don't want indexed and filters that are getting flagged as duplicate content. Rather than typing in thousands of URL's I was hoping that wildcards were still valid.
Technical SEO | | mkhGT0 -
Can hotlinking images from multiple sites be bad for SEO?
Hi, There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person. I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO. The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains. We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs? Thanks, James
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK0 -
Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site. When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section. Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine. Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
Technical SEO | | ahockley0 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Allow or Disallow First in Robots.txt
If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command? example: Allow: /models/ford///page* Disallow: /models////page
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
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