If I specify a custom user agent for wget, eg "MyBot (info#mybot...)" Will wget check this in robots.txt as well, if the bot was banned, or only the general robot exclusions?
No, if you specify your own user agent, Wget does not check for it in the robots.txt file. In fact, I believe I've found another bug in Wget while trying to answer your question. Even if you specify a custom User Agent, Wget seems to adhere to its own User Agent rules when parsing robots.txt. I have created a test case for this and will fix the implementation in Wget ASAP.
Now for the authoritative answer to your original question. The answer is no, because the in the source of Wget, you see the following comment preceding the function that parses the robots file for rules:
/* Parse textual RES specs beginning with SOURCE of length LENGTH.
Return a specs objects ready to be fed to res_match_path.
The parsing itself is trivial, but creating a correct SPECS object is
trickier than it seems, because RES is surprisingly byzantine if you
attempt to implement it correctly.
A "record" is a block of one or more User-Agent' lines followed by
one or moreAllow' or Disallow' lines. Record is accepted by Wget if
one of theUser-Agent' lines was "wget", or if the user agent line
was "*".
After all the lines have been read, we examine whether an exact
("wget") user-agent field was specified. If so, we delete all the
lines read under "User-Agent: *" blocks because we have our own
Wget-specific blocks. This enables the admin to say:
User-Agent: * Disallow: /
User-Agent: google User-Agent: wget Disallow: /cgi-bin
This means that to Wget and to Google, /cgi-bin is disallowed, whereas
for all other crawlers, everything is disallowed. res_parse is
implemented so that the order of records doesn't matter. In the case
above, the "User-Agent: *" could have come after the other one. */
Related
I want to disallow /*foo endpoint regardless of its query string, but allow /*bar regardless of its query string.
A robots.txt like below would also disallow /*bar?foo=foo with query string or with higher path which contains foo such as /foo/bar.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*foo
How should I set robots.txt in this case? Does putting $ at the end work in this scenario?
The "standard" robots.txt doesn't accept wildcards, so I'm talking about the ones like used by Google.
I need to allow only some particular directories and deny the rest. It is my understanding that you should allow first then disallow the rest. Is this right what I have setup?
Allow: /word-lists/words-that-start-with/letter/z/
Allow: /word-lists/words-that-end-with/letter/z/
Disallow: /word-lists/words-that-start-with/letter/
Disallow: /word-lists/words-that-end-with/letter/
Your snippet looks OK, just don't forget to add a User-Agent at the top.
The order of the allow/disallow keywords doesn't matter currently, but it's up to the client to make the correct choice. See Order of precedence for group-member records section in our Robots.txt documentation.
[...] for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule.
The original RFC does state that clients should evaluate rules in the order they're found, however I don't recall any crawler that would actually do that, instead they're playing on the safe side and follow the most restrictive rule.
To evaluate if access to a URL is allowed, a robot must attempt to
match the paths in Allow and Disallow lines against the URL, in the
order they occur in the record. The first match found is used. If no
match is found, the default assumption is that the URL is allowed.
Normally I have this URL structure:
http://example.com/team/name/16356**
But sometimes my CMS generates URLs without name:
http://example./com/team//16356**
and then it’s 404.
How to disavow such URLs when they are empty?
Probably it would be possible with regex for empty symbol here, but I dont want to mess up with Googlebot, better do good from the beginning.
If you want to block URLs like http://example./com/team//16356**, where the number part can be different, you could use the following robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /team//
This will block crawling of any URL whose path starts with /team//.
Can anybody tell me sample code to check if an url has been blocked by robots.txt?
We can specify full url or directory in the robots.txt.
Is there any helper function in Perl?
Check out WWW::RobotRules:
The following methods are provided:
$rules = WWW::RobotRules->new($robot_name)
This is the constructor for WWW::RobotRules objects. The first
argument given to new() is the name of the robot.
$rules->parse($robot_txt_url, $content, $fresh_until)
The parse() method takes as arguments the URL that was used to
retrieve the /robots.txt file, and the contents of the file.
$rules->allowed($uri)
Returns TRUE if this robot is allowed to retrieve this URL.
WWW::RobotRules is the standard class for parsing robots.txt files and then checking URLs to see if they're blocked.
You may also be interested in LWP::RobotUA, which integrates that into LWP::UserAgent, automatically fetching and checking robots.txt files as needed.
Load the robots.txt file and search for "Disallow:" in the file. Then check if the following pattern (after the Disallow:) is within your URL. If so, the URL is banned by the robots.txt
Example -
You find the following line in the robots.txt:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Now remove the "Disallow: " and check, if "/cgi-bin/" (the remaining part) is directly after the TLD.
If your URL looks like:
www.stackoverflow.com/cgi-bin/somwhatelse.pl
it is banned.
If your URL looks like:
www.stackoverflow.com/somwhatelse.pl
it is ok. The complete set of rules you'll find on http://www.robotstxt.org/. This is the way, if you can not install additional modules for any reason.
Better would be to use a module from cpan:
There is a great module on cpan that I use to deal with it: LWP::RobotUA. LWP (libwww) is imho the standard for webaccess in perl - and this module is part of it and ensures your behaviour is nice.
Hum, you don't seem to have even looked! On the first page of search results, I see various download engines that handle robots.txt automatically for you, and at least one that does exactly what you asked.
WWW::RobotRules skips rules "substring"
User-agent: *
Disallow: *anytext*
url http://example.com/some_anytext.html be passed (not banned)
I have dynamic urls like this.
mydomain.com/?pg=login
mydomain.com/?pg=reguser
mydomain.com/?pg=aboutus
mydomain.com/?pg=termsofuse
When the page is requested for ex. mydomainname.com/?pg=login index.php include login.php file.
some of the urls are converted to static url like
mydomain.com/aboutus.html
mydomain.com/termsofuse.html
I need to allow index mydomainname.com/aboutus.html, mydomainname.com/termsofuse.html
and disallow mydomainname.com/?pg=login, mydomainname.com/?pg=reguser, please help to manage my robots.txt file.
I have also mydomainname.com/posted.php?details=50 (details can have any number) which I converted to mydomainname.com/details/50.html
I need also to allow all this type of urls.
If you wish to only index your static pages, you can use this:
Disallow: /*?
This will disallow all URLs which contain a question mark.
If you wish to keep indexing posted.php?details=50 URLs, and you have a finite set of params you wish to disallow, you can create a disallow entry for each, like this:
Disallow: /?pg=login
Or just prevent everything starting with /?
Disallow: /?*
You can use a tool like this to test a sampling of URLs to see if it will match them or not.
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/