I'm looking at a robots.txt file of a site I would like to do a one off scrape and there is this line:
User-agent: spider
Disallow: /
Does this mean they don't want any spiders? I was under the impression that * was used for all spiders. If true this would of-course stop spiders such as google.
This just tells to agents that call themselves spider to be gently enough to not browse the site.
This has no special meaning.
robots.txt files are used only by robots, so a way to exclude all robots is to use a *:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Related
I can't figure out why Google reads my robots.txt file as Disallow: /.
This is what I have in my robots.txt file that is in the main root directory:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
But if I digit in browser it will show Disallow: /: http://revita.hr/robots.txt
I tried everything, submitted the sitemap, added meta robots index, follow into <head>, but it's always the same.
Any ideas?
You seem to have a different robots.txt file if accessing it via HTTPS (→ Allow) instead of HTTP (→ Disallow).
By the way, you don’t need to state
User-agent: *
Allow: /
because allowing everything is the default. As Allow is not part of the original robots.txt specification, you might want to use this instead:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Also note that you should not have a blank line inside a record.
My URL ends with &content=Search. I want to block all URLs that end with this. I have added following in robots.txt.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://local.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://local.com/en/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /*&content=Search$
But it's not working when testing /en/search?q=terms#currentYear=2015&content=search in https://webmaster.yandex.com/robots.xml. It is not working for me because content=search is after # character.
The Yandex Robots.txt analysis will block your example if you test for Search instead of search, as Robots.txt Disallow values are case-sensitive.
If your site uses case-insensitive URLs, you might want to use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*&content=Search$
Disallow: /*&content=search$
# and possibly also =SEARCH, =SEarch, etc.
Having said that, I don’t know if Yandex really supports this for URL fragments (it would be unusual, I guess), although their tool gives this impression.
I want to allow google robot:
1) to only see the main page
2) to see description in a search results for main page
I have the following code but it seems that it doesn't work
User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /site/terms-of-service
Disallow: /site/rules
Disallow: /site/privacy-policy
Allow: /$
Am I missing something or I just need to wait the google robot to visit my site?
Or maybe it is some action required from google webmaster panel?
Thanks in advance!
Your robots.txt should work (and yes, it takes time), but you might want to make the following changes:
It seems you want to target only Google’s bot, so you should use User-agent: Googlebot instead of User-agent: * (which targets all bots that don’t have a specific record in your robots.txt).
It seems that you want to disallow crawling of all pages except the home page, so there is no need to specify a few specific path beginnings in Disallow.
So it could look like this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Allow: /$
Google’s bot may only crawl your home page, nothing else. All other bots may crawl everything.
Is it possible to tell Google not to crawl these pages
/blog/page/10
/blog/page/20
…
/blog/page/100
These are basically Ajax calls that bring blog posts data.
I created this in robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/page/*
But now I have to another page that I want allow which is
/blog/page/start
Is there a way that I tell robots that only pages that end with a number
e.g
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/page/(:num)
I also got an error bellow when I tried to validate the robots.txt file:
Following the original robots.txt specification, this would work (for all conforming bots, including Google’s):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/pages/0
Disallow: /blog/pages/1
Disallow: /blog/pages/2
Disallow: /blog/pages/3
Disallow: /blog/pages/4
Disallow: /blog/pages/5
Disallow: /blog/pages/6
Disallow: /blog/pages/7
Disallow: /blog/pages/8
Disallow: /blog/pages/9
This blocks all URLs whose path begins with /blog/pages/ followed by any number (/blog/pages/9129831823, /blog/pages/9.html, /blog/pages/5/10/foo etc.).
So you should not append the * character (it’s not a wildcard in the original robots.txt specification, and not even needed in your case for bots that interpret it as wildcard).
Google supports some features for robots.txt which are not part of the original robots.txt specification, and therefore are not supported by (all) other bots, e.g., the Allow field. But as the above robots.txt would work, there is no need for using it.
I want one page of my site to be crawled and no others.
Also, if it's any different than the answer above, I would also like to know the syntax for disallowing everything but the root (index) of the website is.
# robots.txt for http://example.com/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /style-guide
Disallow: /splash
Disallow: /etc
Disallow: /etc
Disallow: /etc
Disallow: /etc
Disallow: /etc
Or can I do like this?
# robots.txt for http://example.com/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /under-construction
Also I should mention that this is a WordPress install, so "under-construction," for example, is set to the front page. So in that case it acts as the index.
I think what I need is to have http://example.com craweld, but no other pages.
# robots.txt for http://example.com/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*
Would this mean disallow anything after the root?
The easiest way to allow access to just one page would be:
User-agent: *
Allow: /under-construction
Disallow: /
The original robots.txt specification says that crawlers should read robots.txt from top to bottom, and use the first matching rule. If you put the Disallow first, then many bots will see it as saying they can't crawl anything. By putting the Allow first, those that apply the rules from top to bottom will see that they can access that page.
The expression rules are simple: the expression Disallow: / says "disallow anything that starts with a slash." So that means everything on the site.
Your Disallow: /* means the same thing to Googlebot and Bingbot, but bots that don't support wildcards could see the /* and think that you meant a literal *. So they could assume that it was okay to crawl /*foo/bar.html.
If you just want to crawl http://example.com, but nothing else, you might try:
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
The $ means "end of string," just like in regular expressions. Again, that'll work for Google and Bing, but won't work for other crawlers if they don't support wildcards.
If you log into Google Webmaster Tools, from the left panel go to crawling, then go to Fetch as Google. Here you can test how Google will crawl each page.
In the case of blocking everything but the homepage:
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
will work.
you can use this below both will work
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
or
User-agent: *
Allow: /index.php
Disallow: /
the Allow must be before the Disallow because the file is read from top to bottom
Disallow: / says "disallow anything that starts with a slash." So that means everything on the site.
The $ means "end of string," like in regular expressions. so the result of Allow : /$ is your homepage /index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt#Allow_directive
The order is only important to robots that follow the standard; in the case of the Google or Bing bots, the order is not important.