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how to disallow all dynamic urls in robots.txt
Disallow: /?q=admin/
Disallow: /?q=aggregator/
Disallow: /?q=comment/reply/
Disallow: /?q=contact/
Disallow: /?q=logout/
Disallow: /?q=node/add/
Disallow: /?q=search/
Disallow: /?q=user/password/
Disallow: /?q=user/register/
Disallow: /?q=user/login/
i want to disallow all things that start with /?q=
The answer to your question is to use
Disallow: /?q=
The best (currently accessible) source on robots.txt I could find is on Wikipedia. (The supposedly definitive source is http://www.robotstxt.org, but site is down at the moment.)
According to the Wikipedia page, the standard defines just two fields; UserAgent: and Disallow:. The Disallow: field does not allow explicit wildcards, but each "disallowed" path is actually a path prefix; i.e. matching any path that starts with the specified value.
The Allow: field is a non-standard extension, and any support for explicit wildcards in Disallow would be a non-standard extension. If you use these, you have no right to expect that a (legitimate) web crawler will understand them.
This is not a matter of crawlers being "smart" or "dumb": it is all about standards compliance and interoperability. For example, any web crawler that did "smart" things with explicit wildcard characters in a "Disallow:" would be bad for (hypothetical) robots.txt files where those characters were intended to be interpreted literally.
As Paul said a lot of robots.txt interpreters are not too bright and might not interpret wild-cards in the path as you intend to use them.
That said, some crawlers try to skip dynamic pages on their own, worrying they might get caught in infinite loops on links with varying urls. I am assuming you are asking this question because you face a courageous crawler who is trying hard to access those dynamic paths.
If you have issues with specific crawlers, you can try to investigate specifically how that crawler works by searching its robots.txt capacity and specifying a specific robots.txt section for it.
If you generally just want to disallow such access to your dynamic pages, you might want to rethink your robots.txt design.
More often than not, dynamic parameter handling "pages" are under a specific directory or a specific set of directories. This is why it is normally very simple to simply Disallow: /cgi-bin or /app and be done with it.
In your case you seem to have mapped the root to an area that handles parameters. You might want to reverse the logic of robots.txt and say something like:
User-agent: *
Allow: /index.html
Allow: /offices
Allow: /static
Disallow: /
This way your Allow list will override your Disallow list by adding specifically what crawlers should index. Note not all crawlers are created equal and you may want to refine that robots.txt at a later time adding a specific section for any crawler that still misbehaves.
Related
I want to prevent index of *.html files on our site - so that just clean urls are indexed.
So I would like www.example.com/en/login indexed but not www.example.com/en/login/index.html
Currently I have:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /**.html - not working
Allow: /$
Allow: /*/login*
I know I can just disallow e.g. Disallow: /*/login/index.html, but my issue is I have a number of these .html files that I do not want indexed - so wondered if there was a way to Disallow them all instead of doing them individually?
First of all, you keep using the word "indexed", so I want to ensure that you're aware that the robots.txt convention is only about suggesting to automated crawlers that they avoid certain URLs on your domain, but pages listed in a robots.txt file can still show up on search engine indexes if they have other data about the page. For instance, Google explicitly states they will still index and list a URL, even if they're not allowed to crawl it. I just wanted you to be aware of that in case you are using the word "indexed" to mean "listed in a search engine" rather than "getting crawled by an automated program".
Secondly, there's no standard way to accomplish what you're asking for. Per "The Web Robots Pages":
Note also that globbing and regular expression are not supported in either the User-agent or Disallow lines. The '*' in the User-agent field is a special value meaning "any robot". Specifically, you cannot have lines like "User-agent: bot", "Disallow: /tmp/*" or "Disallow: *.gif".
That being said, it's a common addition that many crawlers do support. For example, in Google's documentation of they directives they support, they describe pattern matching support that does handle using * as a wildcard. So, you could add a Disallow: /*.html$ directive and then Google would not crawl URLs ending with .html, though they could still end up in search results.
But, if your primary goal is telling search engines what URL you consider "clean" and preferred, then what you're actually looking for is specifying Canonical URLs. You can put a link rel="canonical" element on each page with your preferred URL for that page, and search engines that use that element will use it in order to determine which path to prefer when displaying that page.
I like to disallow everything except:
All files in the web root
Specified directories in the web root.
I have seen this example at this answer
Allow: /public/section1/
Disallow: /
But does the above allow crawling of all files in web root?
I want to allow all files in web root.
If you want to disallow directories without disallowing files, you will need to use wildcards:
User-agent: *
Allow: /public/section1/
Disallow: /*/
The above will allow all of the following:
http://example.com/
http://example.com/somefile
http://example.com/public/section1/
http://example.com/public/section1/somefile
http://example.com/public/section1/somedir/
http://example.com/public/section1/somedir/somefile
And it will disallow all of the following:
http://example.com/somedir/
http://example.com/somedir/somefile
http://example.com/somedir/otherdir/somefile
Just be aware that wildcards are not part of the original robots.txt specification, and are not supported by all crawlers. They are supported by all of the major search engines, but there are many other crawlers out there that don't support them.
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I have a folder which is half public: The URL is not linked, the people that know the URL are only a few friends (which will not link it) and it is cryptic enough to make sure that nobody lands there by accident.
However, the link is send via Googlemail and Facebook messages. Is there a way to tell Facebook and Google in a local robots.txt file not to index the page?
When I add it to the "global" robots.txt file then everybody who takes a look there will see that in my /secret-folder-12argoe22v4 might be something interesting. So I will not do that. But will Facebook / Google look at /secret-folder-12argoe22v4/robots.txt?
The content would be
User-agent: *
Disallow: .
or
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret-folder-12argoe22v4/
As CBroe mentioned, a robots.txt file must always be at the top level of the site. If you put it in a subdirecory, it will be ignored. One way you can block a directory without publicly revealing its full name is to block just part of it, like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret
This will block any URL that starts with "/secret", including "/secret-folder-12argoe22v4/".
I should point out that the above is not a 100% reliable way to keep the files out of the search engines. It will keep the search engines from directly crawling the directory, but they can still show it in search results if some other site links to it. You may consider using robots meta tags instead, but even this won't prevent someone from directly following an off-site link. The only really reliable way to keep a directory private is to put it behind a password.
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I want to allow crawlers to access my domain's root directory (i.e. the index.html file), but nothing deeper (i.e. no subdirectories). I do not want to have to list and deny every subdirectory individually within the robots.txt file. Currently I have the following, but I think it is blocking everything, including stuff in the domain's root.
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
How can I write my robots.txt to accomplish what I am trying for?
Thanks in advance!
There's nothing that will work for all crawlers. There are two options that might be useful to you.
Robots that allow wildcards should support something like:
Disallow: /*/
The major search engine crawlers understand the wildcards, but unfortunately most of the smaller ones don't.
If you have relatively few files in the root and you don't often add new files, you could use Allow to allow access to just those files, and then use Disallow: / to restrict everything else. That is:
User-agent: *
Allow: /index.html
Allow: /coolstuff.jpg
Allow: /morecoolstuff.html
Disallow: /
The order here is important. Crawlers are supposed to take the first match. So if your first rule was Disallow: /, a properly behaving crawler wouldn't get to the following Allow lines.
If a crawler doesn't support Allow, then it's going to see the Disallow: / and not crawl anything on your site. Providing, of course, that it ignores things in robots.txt that it doesn't understand.
All the major search engine crawlers support Allow, and a lot of the smaller ones do, too. It's easy to implement.
In short no there is no way to do this nicely using the robots.txt standard. Remember the Disallow specifies a path prefix. Wildcards and allows are non-standard.
So the following approach (a kludge!) will work.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /a
Disallow: /b
Disallow: /c
...
Disallow: /z
Disallow: /A
Disallow: /B
Disallow: /C
...
Disallow: /Z
Disallow: /0
Disallow: /1
Disallow: /2
...
Disallow: /9
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For some reason when I check on Google Webmaster Tool's "Analyze robots.txt" to see which urls are blocked by our robots.txt file, it's not what I'm expecting. Here is a snippet from the beginning of our file:
Sitemap: http://[omitted]/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /scripts
User-agent: *
Disallow: /scripts
# list of articles given by the Content group
Disallow: http://[omitted]/Living/books/book-review-not-stupid.aspx
Disallow: http://[omitted]/Living/books/book-review-running-through-roadblocks-inspirational-stories-of-twenty-courageous-athletic-warriors.aspx
Disallow: http://[omitted]/Living/sportsandrecreation/book-review-running-through-roadblocks-inspirational-stories-of-twenty-courageous-athletic-warriors.aspx
Anything in the scripts folder are correctly blocked for both the Googlebot and Mediapartners-Google. I can see that the two robots are seeing the correct directive because the Googlebot says the scripts are blocked from line 7 while the Mediapartners-Google is blocked from line 4. And yet ANY other url I put in from the disallowed urls under the second user-agent directive are NOT blocked!
I'm wondering if my comment or using absolute urls are screwing things up...
Any insight is appreciated. Thanks.
The reason why they are ignored is that you have the fully qualified URL in the robots.txt file for Disallow entries while the specification doesn't allow it. (You should only specify relative paths, or absolute paths using /). Try the following:
Sitemap: /sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /scripts
User-agent: *
Disallow: /scripts
# list of articles given by the Content group
Disallow: /Living/books/book-review-not-stupid.aspx
Disallow: /Living/books/book-review-running-through-roadblocks-inspirational-stories-of-twenty-courageous-athletic-warriors.aspx
Disallow: /Living/sportsandrecreation/book-review-running-through-roadblocks-inspirational-stories-of-twenty-courageous-athletic-warriors.aspx
As for caching, google tries to get a copy of the robots.txt file every 24 hours in average.
It's the absolute URLs. robots.txt is only supposed to include relative URIs; the domain is inferred based on the domain that the robots.txt was accessed from.
It's been up for at least a week, and Google says it was last downloaded 3 hours ago, so I'm sure it's recent.
Did you recently make this change to your robots.txt file? In my experience it seems that google caches that stuff for a really long time.