Suppose I have a website that uses wget to crawl other websites. I would like to provide website owners the chance of not being crawled by my website. Should they use the robot name wget in their robots.txt file, or do I have to create some other name?
Common practice is to disallow all and to allow just the most popular UAs like this:
User-agent: Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
So I think you don't have any problems with using wget that way
It seems like websites that want to block robots will block them all with a wildcard, rather than selectively - there are so many User Agents out there, too many to list them all.
So as long as wget has a default user agent (which I think it does), I would stick with that.
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'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
How would I disallow all dynamic pages within my robots.txt?
E.g.
page.php?hello=there
page.php?hello=everyone
page.php?thank=you
I would like page.php AND all possible dynamic versions to be disallowed.
At the moment I have
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /page.php
But this still allows e.g. page.php?hello=there
Thanks
What you've already got should block all access to /page.php for all search engines which respect robots.txt (no matter whether there are any query string parameters provided)
Don't forget robots.txt is only for robots :-) If you're trying to block users from accessing the page you'll need to use .htaccess or similar
I can't seem to get this to work but it seems really basic.
I want the domain root to be crawled
http://www.example.com
But nothing else to be crawled and all subdirectories are dynamic
http://www.example.com/*
I tried
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /*/
but the Google webmaster test tool says all subdirectories are allowed.
Anyone have a solution for this? Thanks :)
According to the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) parsing definitions in Google's robots.txt documentation, the order of the Allow and Disallow directives doesn't matter. So changing the order really won't help you.
Instead, use the $ operator to indicate the closing of your path. $ means 'the end of the line' (i.e. don't match anything from this point on)
Test this robots.txt. I'm certain it should work for you (I've also verified in Google Search Console):
user-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
This will allow http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/ to be crawled but everything else blocked.
note: that the Allow directive satisfies your particular use case, but if you have index.html or default.php, these URLs will not be crawled.
side note: I'm only really familiar with Googlebot and bingbot behaviors. If there are any other engines you are targeting, they may or may not have specific rules on how the directives are listed out. So if you want to be "extra" sure, you can always swap the positions of the Allow and Disallow directive blocks, I just set them that way to debunk some of the comments.
When you look at the google robots.txt specifications, you can see that:
Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask support a limited form of "wildcards" for path values. These are:
* designates 0 or more instances of any valid character
$ designates the end of the URL
see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?hl=en#example-path-matches
Then as eywu said, the solution is
user-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
My robots.txt in Google Webmaster Tools shows the following values:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
What does it mean? I don't have enough knowledge about it, so looking for your help. I want to allow all robots to crawl my website, is this the right configuration?
That file will allow all crawlers access
User-agent: *
Allow: /
This basically allows all user agents (the *) to all parts of the site (the /).
If you want to allow every bot to crawl everything, this is the best way to specify it in your robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Note that the Disallow field has an empty value, which means according to the specification:
Any empty value, indicates that all URLs can be retrieved.
Your way (with Allow: / instead of Disallow:) works, too, but Allow is not part of the original robots.txt specification, so it’s not supported by all bots (many popular ones support it, though, like the Googlebot). That said, unrecognized fields have to be ignored, and for bots that don’t recognize Allow, the result would be the same in this case anyway: if nothing is forbidden to be crawled (with Disallow), everything is allowed to be crawled.
However, formally (per the original spec) it’s an invalid record, because at least one Disallow field is required:
At least one Disallow field needs to be present in a record.
I understand that this is fairly old question and has some pretty good answers. But, here is my two cents for the sake of completeness.
As per the official documentation, there are four ways, you can allow complete access for robots to access your site.
Clean:
Specify a global matcher with a disallow segment as mentioned by #unor. So your /robots.txt looks like this.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The hack:
Create a /robots.txt file with no content in it. Which will default to allow all for all type of Bots.
I don't care way:
Do not create a /robots.txt altogether. Which should yield the exact same results as the above two.
The ugly:
From the robots documentation for meta tags, You can use the following meta tag on all your pages on your site to let the Bots know that these pages are not supposed to be indexed.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
In order for this to be applied to your entire site, You will have to add this meta tag for all of your pages. And this tag should strictly be placed under your HEAD tag of the page. More about this meta tag here.
It means you allow every (*) user-agent/crawler to access the root (/) of your site. You're okay.
I think you are good, you're allowing all pages to crawling
User-agent: *
allow:/