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  4. Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?

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Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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  • Milian
    Milian last edited by Oct 15, 2013, 5:05 AM

    Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match?

    e.g:

    I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block

    /fish
    /fish.html
    /fish/salmon.html
    /fishheads
    /fishheads/yummy.html
    /fish.php?id=anything

    But would it block?:

    en/fish
    en/fish.html
    en/fish/salmon.html
    en/fishheads
    en/fishheads/yummy.html
    **en/fish.php?id=anything

    (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier!

    As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as:

    http://www.example.com/BTS-something
    http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
    http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob

    But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as:

    http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
    http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy

    Thanks for listening

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Milian
      Milian last edited by Oct 15, 2013, 5:59 AM Oct 15, 2013, 5:58 AM

      Yes this is what I thought, but wanted some second opinions.

      Although I wouldn't actually need a wild card after BTS, as just leaving it open is the same as using a wildcard:

      /fish*..........  Equivalent to "/fish" -- the trailing wildcard is ignored. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • PinpointDesigns
        PinpointDesigns last edited by Oct 15, 2013, 5:37 AM Oct 15, 2013, 5:37 AM

        You're right in with the **Disallow: /fish **in the robots file blocking all those initial links, but if you wanted to block everything inside the /en/ folder, you would need to do disallow: /en/fish

        You could use a wildcard in the robots.txt file to do something along the lines of Disallow: /BTS-*

        This _'should' _work, but it's always worth checking using a tool to make sure it's all implemented correctly. Distilled did a post a while back about a JS tool which allows you to test if robots.txt files work correctly which can be found here - http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/js-bookmarklet-for-checking-if-a-page-is-blocked-by-robots-txt/

        In addition to this, you could also use the 'blocked URLs' tool in GWT to see if the pages are successfully blocked once you've implemented the code.

        Hope this helps!

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