I'm trying to make sure our robots.txt file is correct and would greatly appreciate some info. We want all bots to be able to crawl and index the homepage and the 'sample triallines' but that's it. Here's the file:
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Allow: /sample-triallines$
Disallow: /
Can anyone please let me know if this is correct?
Thanks in advance.
You can test your XML sitemap directly with a robots testing tool or within the webmaster tools of most major search engines (e.g. Google Search Console). Your current robots.txt file will work for most crawlers for the exact URLs you mentioned (e.g. https://www.example/ and https://www.example/sample-triallines).
However, just to note, if your URLs deviate from these exact URLs they will be blocked to crawlers (e.g. tracking parameters). For example, the below URLs will be blocked with the current robots.txt setup, which may or may not be acceptable for what you're working on.
https://www.example/index.html
https://www.example/?marketing=promo
https://www.example/sample-triallines/
https://www.example/sample-triallines?marketing=promo
If any of these above URLs need to be crawled you'll just need to add additional directives into the robots.txt file as needed and test them within the robots testing tools. Additional information on robots directives can be found here.
Hope this helps
Related
I have a subdomain eg blog.example.com and i want this domain not to index by Google or any other search engine. I put my robots.txt file in 'blog' folder in the server with following configuration:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Would it be fine to not to index by Google?
A few days before my site:blog.example.com shows 931 links but now it is displaying 1320 pages. I am wondering if my robots.txt file is correct then why Google is indexing my domain.
If i am doing anything wrong please correct me.
Rahul,
Not sure if your robots.txt is verbatim, but generally the directives are on TWO lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This file must be accessible from http://blog.example.com/robots.txt - if it is not accessible from that URL, the search engine spider will not find it.
If you have pages that have already been indexed by Google, you can also try using Google Webmaster Tools to manually remove pages from the index.
This question is actually about how to prevent indexing of a subdomain, here your robots file is actually preventing your site from being noindexed.
Don’t use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results.
Introduction to robots.txt: What is a robots.txt file used for? Google Search Central Documentation
For the noindex directive to be effective, the page or resource must not be blocked by a robots.txt file, and it has to be otherwise accessible to the crawler. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file or the crawler can’t access the page, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
Block Search indexing with noindex Google Search Central Documentation
I would like to know if it is possible to block all robots from my site. I get some trouble because I redirect exsample.com to www.exsample.com. The robots.txt checker tools says I don't have a robots.txt file on exsample.com but have it on www.exsample.com.
Hope someone can help me out :)
just make a text file named robots.txt and in this file you write the following
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
and put it in your www folder or public_html folder
this would ask all the search engines to disallow all content of the website but not all the search engines would obbay to this protocol, but the most important search engines would read it and do as you asked
Robots.txt works per host.
So if you want to block URLs on http://www.example.com, the robots.txt must be accessible at http://www.example.com/robots.txt.
Note that the subdomain matters, so you can’t block URLs on http://example.com with a robots.txt only available on http://www.example.com/robots.txt.
Today I experience the problem with search in the google.
When I type "trakopolis" in the google in shows me my page (so it is indexed by google robots), but the description of the page is not available. It is very important to have a description on my website.
the website is:
https://trakopolis.com
the robots txt file is, so I allow everything:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
https://www.google.com.ua/?gws_rd=cr#gs_rn=23&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=O7cIXclKCSxtMd3uDVRVhg&cp=2&gs_id=h&xhr=t&q=trakopolis&es_nrs=true&pf=p&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=tr&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.50165853,d.bGE&fp=d3f611552977418f&biw=1680&bih=949
but as you see the description is not available. I confused :( Sorry if the questio is stupid.
As I see from the google webmaster tools. Google use this robots.txt file, so maybe the issue with redirection from http to https? The website doesn't allow http and we use https. And on main page I use redirection to Login.aspx page in case if user didn't authenticate.
Google shows a description when searching for "trakopolis":
It seems that your robots.txt disallowed crawling of your site some time ago, as some other search engines still display that they are not allowed to show your description, e.g. DuckDuckGo.
Note that your robots.txt uses Allow, which is not part of the original robots.txt specification (but many parsers understand it anyway). It’s equivalent to:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
(But because parsers have to ignore unknown fields, you should have no problem using Allow. An empty or no existent robots.txt always allows crawling of everything.)
Look at the robots.txt of this site:
fr2.dk/robots.txt
The content is:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
That ought to tell google not to index the site, no?
If true, why does the site appear in google searches?
Besides having to wait, because Google's index updates take some time, also note that if you have other sites linking to your site, robots.txt alone won't be sufficient to remove your site.
Quoting Google's support page "Remove a page or site from Google's search results":
If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
One possible alternative solution is also mentioned in above document:
Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).
If you just added this, then you'll have to wait - it's not instantaenous - until Googlebot comes back to respider the site and sees the robots.txt, the site'll still be in their database.
I doubt it's relevant, but you might want to change your "Agent" to "agent" - Google's most likely not case sensitive for this, but can't hurt to follow the standard exactly.
I can confirm Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion File. Here's my file, which I created before putting this origin online:
https://git.habd.as/robots.txt
And the full contents of the file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
User-agent: Google
Disallow: /
And Google still indexed it.
I don't use Google after cancelling my account last March and never had this site added to a webmaster console outside Yandex which leaves me with two assumptions:
Google is scraping Yandex
Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion Standard
I haven't grepped my logs yet but I will and my assumption is I'll find Google spiders in there misbehaving.
in my robots.txt file, I have the following line
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
User-agent:GoogleBot
Disallow: /
Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemapindex.xml
I know that if I put the first 4 lines , googlebot won't index the sites, but what if I put the last line Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemapindex.xml, will googlebot be able to index the site?
Thanks,
I tested your robots.txt against my own domain (which has a sitemap entry for every page) and Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile returned that they were Disallowed access.
Based on this - I would say the robots.txt file takes precedence over any sitemaps.
Plus, logically speaking - if you block the entire domain, the bot is disallowed access to the sitemap. The sitemap entry just tells crawlers where to find your sitemap - not their authorization to access it.
Even if you allowed the sitemap, I don't think bots would crawl your site - sitemaps are designed more for telling the bot how often to crawl your site, not what they are allowed to crawl.
No I dont think Google will do that. Its actually a question of Good bot and Bad bot. Even if you add a robots.txt file to restrict some area Bots can still crawl. Its actually a question of Yes or No. robots.txt is just like a warning board and not a security wall.
googlebot will not even be able to touch the sitemapindex.xml
the robots.txt is a crawler directive.
the sitemap.xml is fetched via the googlebot crawler.
googlebot will not access the sitemapindex.xml
no crawl coverage, no indexing, no SERP listing
you can test this with google webmaster tools robots.txt verification tool and fetch as googlebot (in the labs section) feature.