robots.txt handles the $ as a special character to identify the end of the pattern.
Though, googlebot is parsing some hrefs from JS templates within script tags e.g:
${object.name}
After encoding it, google bot tries to reach mySite.com/$%7Bobject.path%7D which ends in 404s.
To work around this I want do disallow such urls from being crawled by adding a matching directive to my robots.txt.
But using the $ "as is" doesn't work:
Disallow: /$%7Bobject.path%7D$
The only working solution I found was to use the wildcard character:
Disallow: /*%7Bobject.path%7D$
Though, I'm really curious if there is a way to escape that particular $ sign?
Thanks.
EDIT:
Well after some more testing with the google robots.txt testing tool I have some strange results. According to this tool the directive:
Disallow: /*%7Bobject.path%7D$
won't work for /$%7Bobject.path%7D while other tools tells me it matches (like https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/robots-txt/).
What works in google's testing tool is putting the brackets unencoded in the directive:
Disallow: /*{object.path}$
I can't make any sense out of it so I've put both version in my robots.txt.
Googlebot and other crawlers support the $ but it is not part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol standard.
The standard does not include any escape character and Google's documentation doesn't mention it either.
Have you tried using the dollar encoded?:
Disallow: /%24%7Bobject.path%7D$
Related
I want to prevent index of *.html files on our site - so that just clean urls are indexed.
So I would like www.example.com/en/login indexed but not www.example.com/en/login/index.html
Currently I have:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /**.html - not working
Allow: /$
Allow: /*/login*
I know I can just disallow e.g. Disallow: /*/login/index.html, but my issue is I have a number of these .html files that I do not want indexed - so wondered if there was a way to Disallow them all instead of doing them individually?
First of all, you keep using the word "indexed", so I want to ensure that you're aware that the robots.txt convention is only about suggesting to automated crawlers that they avoid certain URLs on your domain, but pages listed in a robots.txt file can still show up on search engine indexes if they have other data about the page. For instance, Google explicitly states they will still index and list a URL, even if they're not allowed to crawl it. I just wanted you to be aware of that in case you are using the word "indexed" to mean "listed in a search engine" rather than "getting crawled by an automated program".
Secondly, there's no standard way to accomplish what you're asking for. Per "The Web Robots Pages":
Note also that globbing and regular expression are not supported in either the User-agent or Disallow lines. The '*' in the User-agent field is a special value meaning "any robot". Specifically, you cannot have lines like "User-agent: bot", "Disallow: /tmp/*" or "Disallow: *.gif".
That being said, it's a common addition that many crawlers do support. For example, in Google's documentation of they directives they support, they describe pattern matching support that does handle using * as a wildcard. So, you could add a Disallow: /*.html$ directive and then Google would not crawl URLs ending with .html, though they could still end up in search results.
But, if your primary goal is telling search engines what URL you consider "clean" and preferred, then what you're actually looking for is specifying Canonical URLs. You can put a link rel="canonical" element on each page with your preferred URL for that page, and search engines that use that element will use it in order to determine which path to prefer when displaying that page.
I'm not even sure if this is the best way to handle this, but I had made a temporary mistake with my rewrites and Google (possibly others) picked up on it, now it has them indexed and keeps coming up with errors.
Basically, I'm generating URLs based on a variety of factors, one being the id of an article, which is automatically generated. These then redirect to the correct spot.
I had first accidentally set up stuff like this:
/2343/news/blahblahblah
/7645/reviews/blahblahblah
Etc.
This was a problem for a lot of reasons, the main one being that there would be duplicates and stuff wasn't pointing to the right places and yada yada. And I fixed them to this now:
/news/2343/blahblahblah
/reviews/7645/blahblahblah
Etc.
And that's all good. But I want to block anything that falls into the pattern of the first. In other words, anything that looks like this:
** = any numerical pattern
/**/anythingelsehere
So that Google (and any others who have maybe indexed the wrong stuff) stops trying to look for these URLs that were all messed up and that don't even exist anymore. Is this possible? Should I even be doing this through robots.txt?
You don't need to setup a robots.txt for that, just return 404 errors for those urls and Google and other search engines will eventually drop them.
Google also has Webmaster tools which you can use to deindex urls. I'm pretty sure other hosts have similar things.
To answer the question: Yes, you can block any URLs that start with a number.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /0
Disallow: /1
Disallow: /2
Disallow: /3
Disallow: /4
Disallow: /5
Disallow: /6
Disallow: /7
Disallow: /8
Disallow: /9
It would block URLs like:
example.com/1
example.com/2.html
example.com/3/foo
example.com/4you
example.com/52347612
These URLs would still be allowed:
example.com/foo/1
example.com/foo2.html
example.com/bar/3/foo
example.com/only4you
I have developed a Web Crawler and now i want to respect the robots.txt file of the websites that i am crawling.
I see that this is the robots.txt file structure:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /~joe/junk.html
Disallow: /~joe/foo.html
Disallow: /~joe/bar.html
I can read, line by line and then use explode with space character as delimiter to find data.
Is there any other way that i can load the entire data ?
Does this kind of files have a language, like XPath has ?
Or do i have to interprete the entire file ?
Any help is welcomed, even links, duplicates if found ...
The structure is very simple, so the best thing you can do is probably parse the file on your own. i would read it line by line and as you said look for keywords like User-agent, Disallow etc.
I want to disallow robots from crawling any folder, at any position in the url with the name: this-folder.
Examples to disallow:
http://mysite.com/this-folder/
http://mysite.com/houses/this-folder/
http://mysite.com/some-other/this-folder/
http://mysite.com/no-robots/this-folder/
This is my attempt:
Disallow: /.*this-folder/
Will this work?
Officially globbing and regular expressions are not supported:
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
but apparently some search engines support this.
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how to disallow all dynamic urls in robots.txt
Disallow: /?q=admin/
Disallow: /?q=aggregator/
Disallow: /?q=comment/reply/
Disallow: /?q=contact/
Disallow: /?q=logout/
Disallow: /?q=node/add/
Disallow: /?q=search/
Disallow: /?q=user/password/
Disallow: /?q=user/register/
Disallow: /?q=user/login/
i want to disallow all things that start with /?q=
The answer to your question is to use
Disallow: /?q=
The best (currently accessible) source on robots.txt I could find is on Wikipedia. (The supposedly definitive source is http://www.robotstxt.org, but site is down at the moment.)
According to the Wikipedia page, the standard defines just two fields; UserAgent: and Disallow:. The Disallow: field does not allow explicit wildcards, but each "disallowed" path is actually a path prefix; i.e. matching any path that starts with the specified value.
The Allow: field is a non-standard extension, and any support for explicit wildcards in Disallow would be a non-standard extension. If you use these, you have no right to expect that a (legitimate) web crawler will understand them.
This is not a matter of crawlers being "smart" or "dumb": it is all about standards compliance and interoperability. For example, any web crawler that did "smart" things with explicit wildcard characters in a "Disallow:" would be bad for (hypothetical) robots.txt files where those characters were intended to be interpreted literally.
As Paul said a lot of robots.txt interpreters are not too bright and might not interpret wild-cards in the path as you intend to use them.
That said, some crawlers try to skip dynamic pages on their own, worrying they might get caught in infinite loops on links with varying urls. I am assuming you are asking this question because you face a courageous crawler who is trying hard to access those dynamic paths.
If you have issues with specific crawlers, you can try to investigate specifically how that crawler works by searching its robots.txt capacity and specifying a specific robots.txt section for it.
If you generally just want to disallow such access to your dynamic pages, you might want to rethink your robots.txt design.
More often than not, dynamic parameter handling "pages" are under a specific directory or a specific set of directories. This is why it is normally very simple to simply Disallow: /cgi-bin or /app and be done with it.
In your case you seem to have mapped the root to an area that handles parameters. You might want to reverse the logic of robots.txt and say something like:
User-agent: *
Allow: /index.html
Allow: /offices
Allow: /static
Disallow: /
This way your Allow list will override your Disallow list by adding specifically what crawlers should index. Note not all crawlers are created equal and you may want to refine that robots.txt at a later time adding a specific section for any crawler that still misbehaves.