undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. Invisible robots.txt?

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.

Invisible robots.txt?

Technical SEO
4
7
4.0k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • joshcanhelp
    joshcanhelp last edited by Nov 17, 2011, 4:06 PM

    So here's a weird one...

    Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com"

    So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK!

    But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before.

    Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen?

    Thanks!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • AjazMozPro
      AjazMozPro last edited by Jan 1, 2017, 8:34 PM Jan 1, 2017, 8:34 PM

      Hi Josh

      Did you ever find out how this was happening? 
      I've got the same issue with a wordpress site.. no robots.txt visible in FTP but it is accessible in a browser to view.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,5 years
      • joshcanhelp
        joshcanhelp @Desiree-CP last edited by Nov 18, 2011, 2:07 PM Nov 18, 2011, 2:07 PM

        I'm seeing the meta tag that's added for the first option:

        <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

        ... but I could actually access a file at domain.com/robots.txt that had the content mentioned above. When I logged in via FTP, it wasn't there. I added an actual file there with the correct information and reloaded it to make sure it was showing the correct information.

        I tested it on my local install and I'm not seeing a robots file being generated.

        Very odd!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Desiree-CP
          Desiree-CP last edited by Nov 17, 2011, 9:05 PM Nov 17, 2011, 9:05 PM

          Yes, you probably answered your own question.  In WordPress, there are two different settings under Settings > Privacy:

          1. I would like my site visible to everyone, including search engines and archivers.

          2. I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

          If option #2 was selected, WordPress doesn't create a robots.txt file for you but instead it automatically generates a tag on every single page.

          I hope that helps!

          joshcanhelp 1 Reply Last reply Nov 18, 2011, 2:07 PM Reply Quote 0
          • joshcanhelp
            joshcanhelp @Superb last edited by Nov 17, 2011, 4:32 PM Nov 17, 2011, 4:32 PM

            Just make sure you don't set that Privacy setting in a live directory. It takes weeks/months to fully recover.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Superb
              Superb @joshcanhelp last edited by Nov 17, 2011, 4:30 PM Nov 17, 2011, 4:30 PM

              This is interesting. I am currently working on the robots.txt and testing it for different purposes. I also thought to do some test with wordpress websites as well so thanks for the update I’ll keep that in mind before actually testing different stuff.

              Thanks!

              joshcanhelp 1 Reply Last reply Nov 17, 2011, 4:32 PM Reply Quote 0
              • joshcanhelp
                joshcanhelp last edited by Nov 17, 2011, 4:16 PM Nov 17, 2011, 4:16 PM

                I should mention that this is a WordPress site and, with that, I may have answered my own question. Perhaps WordPress generates a robots.txt dynamically when the setting is active at Settings > Privacy?

                Superb 1 Reply Last reply Nov 17, 2011, 4:30 PM Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                1 out of 7
                • First post
                  1/7
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Extima-Christian

                  Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?

                  Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
                  Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?

                  Technical SEO | Jan 31, 2018, 5:25 PM | Extima-Christian
                  1
                • btreloar

                  Robots.txt Syntax for Dynamic URLs

                  I want to Disallow certain dynamic pages in robots.txt and am unsure of the proper syntax. The pages I want to disallow all include the string ?Page= Which is the proper syntax?
                  Disallow: ?Page=
                  Disallow: ?Page=*
                  Disallow: ?Page=
                  Or something else?

                  Technical SEO | Mar 29, 2017, 11:30 AM | btreloar
                  0
                • RoxBrock

                  Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search

                  I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
                  Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.

                  Technical SEO | Sep 23, 2016, 4:03 PM | RoxBrock
                  1
                • renalynd27

                  One robots.txt file for multiple sites?

                  I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena

                  Technical SEO | Mar 29, 2016, 1:01 PM | renalynd27
                  0
                • EcommerceSite

                  Do I need to block my cart page in robots.txt?

                  I have a site with woocommerce. Do I need to block the cart page?

                  Technical SEO | Mar 6, 2015, 5:36 PM | EcommerceSite
                  0
                • danwebman

                  Guys & Gals anyone know if urllist.txt is still used?

                  I'm using a tool which generates urllist.txt and looking on the SEO Forums it seems that Yahoo used to use this. What I'd like to know is is it still used anywhere and should we have it on the site?

                  Technical SEO | Mar 13, 2014, 9:00 AM | danwebman
                  0
                • seoug_2005

                  Robots.txt and canonical tag

                  In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?

                  Technical SEO | Aug 19, 2011, 6:49 AM | seoug_2005
                  0
                • JordanJudson

                  Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?

                  When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?

                  Technical SEO | May 6, 2011, 3:55 PM | JordanJudson
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.