I have a site that is meant to have http://domain.com/blog as the root directory, and any traffic to http://domain.com is redirected to http://domain.com/blog.
This causes a problem cause when I go to Google and do site:domain.com, I see the root directory with the title of one of the first articles on the page. How can I block the root from being crawled, thus not showing up in search?
In webmaster tools I added the site as http://domain.com but I only fetch as google on the /blog directory and other static pages. Is that correct?
I usually know how to do this but this time the site has a sub-directory as the intended root so it's a bit different.
Can someone verify if this will do what I am trying to achieve?
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
Robots.txt does NOT block a crawler from crawling certain webpages. Robots.txt is simply a text file with a set of guidelines that you ask the crawler to follow it does not at any time block a crawler. If you want to block a certain webpage from being crawl/visited - you will then have to block all access to that page, this includes other users that are not crawlers. But since you have already have it to redirect I see no issue.
Also the $ is not a unified standard, neither is Allow(technically). Try to make it focused on specific bots. Google and Bing recognise the Allow keyword, but many other bots does not.
Also your current robots.txt says this: Do not crawl any pages, but the root
I recommend this as your robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /$
This tells all other bots, but google to not crawl your webpage. And it tells the google crawler not to crawl in root, but everything else is allowed.
Related
I am trying to run web scraping using selenium
What does this robot.txt content mean?
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /launch-announcement/
Can i run web scraping in all folders except go and launch-announcement?
What is a robots.txt file?
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website. The robots.txt file is part of the the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users. The REP also includes directives like meta robots, as well as page-, subdirectory-, or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat links (such as “follow” or “nofollow”).
In practice, robots.txt files indicate whether certain user agents (web-crawling software) can or cannot crawl parts of a website. These crawl instructions are specified by “disallowing” or “allowing” the behavior of certain (or all) user agents. view more...
The Disallow: tells the robot that it should not visit the mentioned page on the site.
Can i run web scraping in all folders except go and launch-announcement?
Yes you can scrape the other page except these 2.
According to the basic robots.txt guide, the rule-
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /launch-announcement/
means crawling /go/ and /launch-announcement/ (and their subdirectories) is disallowed for all user agents.
I am trying to allow the Googlebot webcrawler to index my site. My robots.txt initially looked like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Host: www.sitename.com
Sitemap: https://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml
And I changed it to:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Host: www.sitename.com
Sitemap: https://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml
Only Google is still not indexing my links.
I am trying to allow the Googlebot webcrawler to index my site.
Robots rules has nothing to do with indexing! They are ONLY about crawling ability. A page can be indexed, even if it is forbidden to be crawled!
host directive is supported only by Yandex.
If you want all bots are able to crawl your site, your robots.txt file should be placed under https://www.sitename.com/robots.txt, be available with status code 200, and contain:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: https://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml
From the docs:
Robots.txt syntax can be thought of as the “language” of robots.txt files. There are five common terms you’re likely come across in a robots file. They include:
User-agent: The specific web crawler to which you’re giving crawl instructions (usually a search engine). A list of most user agents can be found here.
Disallow: The command used to tell a user-agent not to crawl particular URL. Only one "Disallow:" line is allowed for each URL.
Allow (Only applicable for Googlebot): The command to tell Googlebot it can access a page or subfolder even though its parent page or subfolder may be disallowed.
Crawl-delay: How many seconds a crawler should wait before loading and crawling page content. Note that Googlebot does not acknowledge this command, but crawl rate can be set in Google Search Console.
Sitemap: Used to call out the location of any XML sitemap(s) associated with this URL. Note this command is only supported by Google, Ask, Bing, and Yahoo.
Try to specifically mention Googlebot in your robots.txt-directives such as:
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
or allow all web crawlers access to all content
User-agent: *
Disallow:
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
Google has started crawling my site, but from a temporary domain (beta.mydomain instead of just mydomain) and also I only want him to crawl just some of my pages. Therefore, I want to stop their crawl and only let them crawl pages I specify in a sitemap. How can I do that? (I know how to add a sitemap, but how can I stop their current crawling and request that they'll crawl just the sitemap)
Update: If I kill the subdomain beta.mydomain - will that be "fine" by them or will they continue go over all killed pages and "not like" them? Can I specify that in each page's header?
Create a single text file called 'robots.txt' in the root folder for your site. Inside...
User-agent: *
Disallow: /thisfolder/
Disallow: /foo.html
Disallow: /andthisfoldertoo/
Disallow: /andthisfile.html
I use this for project files. In fact, as I write this I think I'll change the way I work on projects and always put them in a sub-directory called /projects/project1/ so one line will do...
Disallow: /projects/
AND I also add a line for my image files. I don't like my images all over the web...
Disallow: /imgs/
You could start with a robots.txt file.
See google's info here
I presume you have already looked at webmaster tools and sitemaps from what you say? Do be aware that while a sitemap will help tell google WHAT to crawl, it won't work very well for telling them what NOT to crawl.
For that you will want to use the robots.txt file to block certain pages / folders.
Use a robots.txt, see this site.
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.