Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
-
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like:
staging.domain.com
User-agent: *
Disallow: /in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.
-
Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked.
-
I agree. The name of your subdomain being "staging" didn't register at all with me until Matt brought it up. I was offering a generic response to the subdomain question whereas I believe Matt focused on how to handle a staging site. Interesting viewpoint.
-
Matt/Ryan-
Great discussion, thanks for the input. The staging.domain.com is just one of the domains we don't want indexed. Some of them still need to be accessed by the public, some like staging could be restricted to specific IPs.
I realize after your discussion I probably should have used a different example of a sub-domain. On the other hand it might not have sparked the discussion so maybe it was a good example
-
.htaccess files can be placed at any directory level of a site so you can do it for just the subdomain or even just a directory of a domain.
-
Staging URL's are typically only used for testing so rather than do a deny I would recommend using a specific ALLOW for only the IP addresses that should be allowed access.
I would imagine you don't want it indexed because you don't want the rest of the world knowing about it.
You can also use HTACCESS to use username/passwords. It is simple but you can give that to clients if that is a concern/need.
-
Correct.
-
Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.
The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.
-
Hi Matt.
Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.
-
Interesting, hadn't thought of using htaccess to block Googlebot.Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Thanks Ryan. So you don't see any issues with de-indexing the main site if I created a second robots.txt file, e.g.
http://staging.domin.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /That was my initial thought but when Google announced they consider sub-domains part of the TLD I was afraid it might affect the htp://www.domain.com versions of the pages. So you're saying the subdomain is basically treated like a folder you block on the primary domain?
-
Use an .htaccess file to only allow from certain ip addresses or ranges.
Here is an article describing how: http://www.kirupa.com/html5/htaccess_tricks.htm
-
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Place a robots.txt file in the root of the subdomain.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /This method will block the subdomain while leaving your primary domain unaffected.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
Technical SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
Shopping Carts & Sub Domains
I was hoping someone could guide me in making the correct decision regarding integrating my existing domain with a hosted shopping cart. I have an existing website to promote my bricks and mortar retail operation and am expanding into web retailing. I will be using one of the major hosted shopping carts. What is the best way to join the two components from an SEO perspective? Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider and have both components operate under the same general domain? I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites. I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other. And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole. What is the truth? Which is the better way to go? Any guidance would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MEI1520 -
.com or .co.uk in UK index? but the .com has higher domain authority...
Hi there i have a .com and a .co.uk for a site that has been around a while. However not much seo has been done on it, i was wonderign do i continue to optimise for the .com or switch to the .co.uk to rank in Google UK index for various search terms. .COM = 40 domain authority .CO.UK - 10 domain authority. Let the debate start 🙂
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
Issue with .uk.com domain
hi i have rockshore.uk.com which is not indexing properly. the internal pages do not show up for the text they have on them, or the title tags. the site is on aekmps shops platform. I understand that a .uk.com is not a proper TLD but i think i have a subdomain of .uk.com Can anyone help? thanks
Technical SEO | | Turkey0