I need to disallow http://example.com/startup?page=2 search pages from being indexed.
I want http://example.com/startup to be indexed but not http://example.com/startup?page=2 and page3 and so on.
Also, startup can be random, e.g., http://example.com/XXXXX?page
Something like this works, as confirmed by Google Webmaster Tools "test robots.txt" function:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /startup?page=
Disallow The value of this field
specifies a partial URL that is not to
be visited. This can be a full path,
or a partial path; any URL that starts
with this value will not be retrieved.
However, if the first part of the URL will change, you must use wildcards:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /startup?page=
Disallow: *page=
Disallow: *?page=
You can put this on the pages you do not want indexed:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE">
This tells robots not to index the page.
On a search page, it may be more interesting to use:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
This instructs robots to not index the current page, but still follow the links on this page, allowing them to get to the pages found in the search.
Create a text file and name it: robots.txt
Add user agents and disallow sections (see sample below)
Place the file in the root of your site
Sample:
###############################
#My robots.txt file
#
User-agent: *
#
#list directories robots are not allowed to index
#
Disallow: /testing/
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /assets/
Disallow: /images/
#
#
#list specific files robots are not allowed to index
#
Disallow: /startup?page=2
Disallow: /startup?page=3
Disallow: /startup?page=3
#
#
#End of robots.txt file
#
###############################
Here's a link to Google's actual robots.txt file
You can get some good information on the Google webmaster's help topic on blocking or removing pages using a robots.txt file
Related
I am a photographer and I need to prevent the indexing ( thus the finding ) of the images of my clients that are displayed on a password protected shop.
I could include in the file names a specific string like ... WWWWW ... that would mark the files I want to hide.
Does this robots.txt do the work ?
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*WWWWW*
How can I test if it does ?
Thanks
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.gif$
or you can totally disable with the help of htaccess file.
Deny from all
You can test your existing robots.txt file by using for example https://en.ryte.com/free-tools/robots-txt/ or even Googles own tester https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598?hl=en
The following will disallow a specific directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /path/to/images/
You can also use an wildcard *:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.jpg # Disallows any JPEG images
Disallow: /*/images/ # Disallows parsing of all */images/* directories
There's no need for trailing wildcards, they are ignored. /*/path/* equals /*/path/.
You don't want to make a extensive list of every single file to disallow, because the contents of the robots.txt file is publicly available. Therefore it is good practice to prioritize directories over file paths.
See https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_txt#url-matching-based-on-path-values for examples of paths/wildcards, and what they actually match.
I seem to be struggling with a robots.txt file in the following scenario. I would like all root folder *.php files to be indexed except for one (exception.php) and would like all content from all subdirectories of the root folder not to be indexed.
I have tried the following, but it allows accessing php files in subdirectories even though subdirectories in general are not indexed?
....
# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /*.php
disallow: /*
disallow: /exceptions.php
....
Can anyone help with this?
For crawlers that interpret * in Disallow values as wildcard (it’s not part of the robots.txt spec, but many crawlers support it anyway), this should work:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /exceptions.php
Disallow: /*/
This disallows URLs like:
https://example.com/exceptions.php
https://example.com//
https://example.com/foo/
https://example.com/foo/bar.php
And it allows URLs like:
https://example.com/
https://example.com/foo.php
https://example.com/bar.html
For crawlers that don’t interpret * in Disallow values as wildcard, you would have to list all subfolders (on the first level):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /exceptions.php
Disallow: /foo/
Disallow: /bar/
I would like for Google to ignore URLs like this:
https://www.example.com/blog/category/web-development?page=2
As my links are getting indexed in Google I need to stop indexing them. What code should I use to not index them?
This is my curet robots.txt file:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /privacy
Disallow: /404.html
Disallow: /500.html
Disallow: /tweets
Disallow: /tweet/
Can I use this to disallow them?
Disallow: /blog/category/*?*
With robots.txt, you can prevent crawling, not necessarily indexing.
If you want to disallow Google to crawl URLs
whose paths start with /blog/category/, and
that contain a query component (e.g., ?, ?page, ?page=2, ?foo=bar&page=2 etc.)
then you can use this:
Disallow: /blog/category/*?
You don’t need another * at the end because Disallow values represent the start of the URL (beginning from the path).
But note that this is not supported by all bots. According to the original robots.txt spec, the * has no special meaning. Conforming bots would interpret the above line literally (* as part of the path). If you were to follow only the rules from the original specification, you would have to list every occurrence:
Disallow: /blog/category/c1?
Disallow: /blog/category/c2?
Disallow: /blog/category/c3?
Can I combine the 2 directive below into one as show under it and google or bing bot will still follow my robots? I have recently seen bingbot not following the second directive and thinking if I combine the directive they might follow it.
Original
User-agent:*
Disallow: /folder1/
Disallow: /folder2/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.png
Disallow: /*.jpg
Wanted to change to this
User-agent:*
Disallow: /folder1/
Disallow: /folder2/
Disallow: /*.png
Disallow: /*.jpg
You may only have one record with User-agent: *:
If the value is '*', the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not matched any of the other records. It is not allowed to have multiple such records in the "/robots.txt" file.
When having more than one of these records, bots (that are not matched by a more specific record) might only follow the first one in the file.
So you have to use this record:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder1/
Disallow: /folder2/
Disallow: /*.png
Disallow: /*.jpg
Note that the * in a Disallow value has no special meaning in the original robots.txt specification, but some consumers use it as a wildcard.
Few questions
How can you effectively block directories and their contents using robots.txt?
Is it ok to do:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /group
Disallow: /home
Do you have to put a trailing slash, for example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /group/
Disallow: /home/
Also what is the difference between Disallow in robots.txt and adding ?
If I want google not to show specific pages and folders in a directory, what should I do?
Is it ok to do:
User-agent: * Disallow: /group Disallow: /home
You must place these on separate lines
It is highly recommended that you put a trailing slash if you are trying to exlude the directories home and group
I would do something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /group/
Disallow: /home/
About the trailing slash, yes, you should add it according to http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/robotstxt.shtml:
Remember to add the trailing slash ("/") if you are indicating a directory. If you simply add
User-agent: *
Disallow: /privatedata
the robots will be disallowed from accessing privatedata.html as well as ?privatedataandstuff.html as well as the directory tree beginning from /privatedata/ (and so on). In other words, there is an implied wildcard character following whatever you list in the Disallow line.
If you do not want google to show specific pages or directories, add a Disallow line for each of these pages or directories.