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
Related
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
I have a page that is https://www.somedomain.com and then under that page I have the option for users to change the language, like
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=en&random_id=123
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=de&random_id=123
https://www.somedomain.com/?change_language=fr&random_id=123
etc.
Is it possible to deny Googlebot from crawling these links, but still crawl the https://www.somedomain.com/ main page?
You can use robots.txt to target just the query parameter:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?change_language
This will prevent Google or other good bots from crawling the language options on the homepage. If you want to make it more universal to all pages:
User-agent: *
Disallow: ?change_language
However, you might want to consider letting those language changes to be crawled and instead utilize the rel="alternate" hreflang specification that Google and Bing support.
This way you can indiciate to the engines that the content is in multiple languages allowing your site to get indexed in all the different country specific versions of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
I am trying to disallow a specific page and its parameters along with a parameter on the entire site. Below I have the exact examples.
We now have a page that will redirect and track exteral urls. Any external URL we want to track will be linked like /redirect?u=http://example.com We do not want to add rel="nofollow" to every link.
Last but not least (our biggest seo and index issue) is every single page has an auto generate URL to disable or enable mobile. So it can be on any page like /?mobileVersion=off (or on) or /accounts?login_to=%2Fdashboard&mobileVersion=off
Basically the easy way to disallow the two parameters would be to disallow mobileVersion and u from any page. (u is the parameter needed to redirect the URL and is only valid on /redirect)
My current robots.txt config:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /redirect
Disallow: / *?*mobileVersion=off
If you want to see our full robots.txt files its located at http://spicethymeinc.com/robots.txt.
you could change
Disallow: / *?*mobileVersion=off
to
Disallow: /*mobileVersion=off
but it looks like it should work.
I'm going off the wildcard section and examples on this page:
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/
edit: I have tested with the googlebot and googlebot mobile. The are blocked by both your current robots.txt and my suggested change. Google webmaster tools has a handy robots checker you can use to test.
my client has a load of pages which they dont want indexed by google - they are all called
http://example.com/page-xxx
so they are /page-123 or /page-2 or /page-25 etc
Is there a way to stop google indexing any page that starts with /page-xxx using robots.txt
would something ike this work?
Disallow: /page-*
Thanks
In the first place, a line that says Disallow: /post-* isn't going to do anything to prevent crawling of pages of the form "/page-xxx". Did you mean to put "page" in your Disallow line, rather than "post"?
Disallow says, in essence, "disallow urls that start with this text". So your example line will disallow any url that starts with "/post-". (That is, the file is in the root directory and its name starts with "post-".) The asterisk in this case is superfluous, as it's implied.
Your question is unclear as to where the pages are. If they're all in the root directory, then a simple Disallow: /page- will work. If they're scattered across directories in many different places, then things are a bit more difficult.
As #user728345 pointed out, the easiest way (from a robots.txt standpoint) to handle this is to gather all of the pages you don't want crawled into one directory, and disallow access to that. But I understand if you can't move all those pages.
For Googlebot specifically, and other bots that support the same wildcard semantics (there are a surprising number of them, including mine), the following should work:
Disallow: /*page-
That will match anything that contains "page-" anywhere. However, that will also block something like "/test/thispage-123.html". If you want to prevent that, then I think (I'm not sure, as I haven't tried it) that this will work:
Disallow: */page-
It looks like the * will work as a Google wild card, so your answer will keep Google from crawling, however wildcards are not supported by other spiders. You can search google for robot.txt wildcards for more info. I would see http://seogadget.co.uk/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ for more information.
Then I pulled this from Google's documentation:
Pattern matching
Googlebot (but not all search engines) respects some pattern matching.
To match a sequence of characters, use an asterisk (*). For instance, to block access to all >subdirectories that begin with private:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private*/
To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?) (more specifically, any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string):
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?
To specify matching the end of a URL, use $. For instance, to block any URLs that end with .xls:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.xls$
You can use this pattern matching in combination with the Allow directive. For instance, if a ? indicates a session ID, you may want to exclude all URLs that contain them to ensure Googlebot doesn't crawl duplicate pages. But URLs that end with a ? may be the version of the page that you do want included. For this situation, you can set your robots.txt file as follows:
User-agent: *
Allow: /?$
Disallow: /?
The Disallow: / *? directive will block any URL that includes a ? (more specifically, it will block any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string).
The Allow: /*?$ directive will allow any URL that ends in a ? (more specifically, it will allow any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by a string, followed by a ?, with no characters after the ?).
Save your robots.txt file by downloading the file or copying the contents to a text file and saving as robots.txt. Save the file to the highest-level directory of your site. The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain and must be named "robots.txt". A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn't valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. For instance, http://www.example.com/robots.txt is a valid location, but http://www.example.com/mysite/robots.txt is not.
Note: From what I read this is a Google only approach. Officially there is no Wildcard allowed in robots.txt for disallow.
You could put all the pages that you don't want to get visited in a folder and then use disallow to tell bots not to visit pages in that folder.
Disallow: /private/
I don't know very much about robots.txt so I'm not sure how to use wildcards like that
Here, it says "you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines."
http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/robotstxt.html
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:/