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.
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 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.
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.
This is what I've got in my robots.txt, placed in the base directory, of course:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /foo/
But then, in Google, I have no index of /foo/, but for some reason, I still have /foo/foo.php showing up as a link in Google.
How come? Did I write something incorrectly? Do I need to write something else?
When you put robots.txt after your site went live, Google could already index files under /foo/.
You can remove already indexed files via Google Webmaster Tools - removal request.
robots.txt does not prevent Google to link to your blocked pages. Google won't index your blocked pages (so it won't show the page title/description/snippet), but if it finds a link to any blocked page, it might still link it from their search results.
If you want to also forbid this linking, you could use the meta element with robots and noindex.
Look at the robots.txt of this site:
fr2.dk/robots.txt
The content is:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
That ought to tell google not to index the site, no?
If true, why does the site appear in google searches?
Besides having to wait, because Google's index updates take some time, also note that if you have other sites linking to your site, robots.txt alone won't be sufficient to remove your site.
Quoting Google's support page "Remove a page or site from Google's search results":
If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
One possible alternative solution is also mentioned in above document:
Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).
If you just added this, then you'll have to wait - it's not instantaenous - until Googlebot comes back to respider the site and sees the robots.txt, the site'll still be in their database.
I doubt it's relevant, but you might want to change your "Agent" to "agent" - Google's most likely not case sensitive for this, but can't hurt to follow the standard exactly.
I can confirm Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion File. Here's my file, which I created before putting this origin online:
https://git.habd.as/robots.txt
And the full contents of the file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
User-agent: Google
Disallow: /
And Google still indexed it.
I don't use Google after cancelling my account last March and never had this site added to a webmaster console outside Yandex which leaves me with two assumptions:
Google is scraping Yandex
Google doesn't respect the Robots Exclusion Standard
I haven't grepped my logs yet but I will and my assumption is I'll find Google spiders in there misbehaving.