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 blocked internal resources Wordpress
-
Hi all,
We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted. I've created the following new one:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.phpHowever, in the site audit on SemRush, I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts.
Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO?
Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index?
Thanks for your thoughts!
-
Thanks for the answer!
Last question: is /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php an important part that has to be crawled? I found this explanation: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/190993/why-use-admin-ajax-php-and-how-does-it-work/191073#191073
However, on this specific website there is no html at all when I check the source code, only one line with 0 on it.
-
I would leave all the disallows out except for the /wp-admin/ section. For example, I'd rewrite the robots.txt file to read:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/Also, you kind of want Google to index your cached content. In the event your servers go down it will still be able to make your content available.
I hope that helps. Let me know how that works out for you!
-
Thanks for the clear answer.
I've changed the robots.txt to:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.phpThis should avoid problems with not indexing (parts of) cached content.
Or should I leave all the Disallows out?
-
Hey there --
Blocking resources with the robots.txt file prevents search engines from crawling content the no-index tag would be better suited for preventing content from being indexed.
However, previous best practice would dictate blocking access to /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ directories, etc but that's no longer necessary.
Today, Google will fetch all your styling and JavaScript files so they can render your pages completely. Search engines now try to understand your page's layout and presentation as a key part of how they evaluate quality.
So, yeah this might have some impact on your SEO.
Also, if you're using a plugin to cache content you should want Google to crawl your cache content. And in my experience, Googlebot does a good job of not indexing /wp-content/ sections.
So, for your example page, https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js it shouldn't end up in their index.
Hope this helps some.
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
Hello Everyone! I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines. The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks, Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alloydigital0 -
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it. Here's the site if you need to see it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Robots.txt is blocking Wordpress Pages from Googlebot?
I have a robots.txt file on my server, which I did not develop, it was done by the web designer at the company before me. Then there is a word press plugin that generates a robots.txt file. How Do I unblock all the wordpress pages from googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Does Blocking ICMP Requests Affect SEO?
All in the title really. One of our clients came up with errors with a server header check, so I pinged them and it times out. The hosting company have told them that it's because they're blocking ICMP requests and this doesn't affect SEO at all... but I know that sometimes pinging posts, etc... can be beneficial so is this correct? Thanks, Steve.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0