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 in subfolders and hreflang issues
-
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations:
UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txtWe've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US.
They have the following hreflang tags across all pages:
We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously).
Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all.
Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location.
Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?
-
Hi there!
Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:
A **
robots.txt**file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlersFrom Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.
You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
PageSpeed Insights DNS Issue
Hi Anyone else having problems with Google's Pagespeed tool? I am trying to benchmark a couple of my sites but, according to Google, my sites are not loading. They will work when I run them through the test at one point but if I try again, say 15 mins later, they will present the following error message An error has occured DNS error while resolving DOMAIN. Check the spelling of the host, and ensure that the page is accessible from the public Internet. You may refresh to try again. If the problem persists, please visit the PageSpeed Insights mailing list for support. This isn't too much an issue for testing page speed but am concerned that if Google is getting this error on the speed test it will also get the error when trying to crawl and index the pages. I can confirm the sites are up and running. I the sites are pointed at the server via A-records and haven't been changed for many weeks so cannot be a dns updating issue. Am at a loss to explain. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Robots.txt Sitemap with Relative Path
Hi Everyone, In robots.txt, can the sitemap be indicated with a relative path? I'm trying to roll out a robots file to ~200 websites, and they all have the same relative path for a sitemap but each is hosted on its own domain. Basically I'm trying to avoid needing to create 200 different robots.txt files just to change the domain. If I do need to do that, though, is there an easier way than just trudging through it?
Technical SEO | | MRCSearch0 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0 -
Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/
Technical SEO | | kchandler0