The "webmaster" disallowed all ROBOTS to fight spam! Help!!
-
One of the companies I do work for has a magento site. I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly. Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots.
I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website. They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site? Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different?
I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case!
If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones. Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Thanks for the suggestions!! I'll keep you updated.
-
You can get the list of good robots from the list at Robotstxt.org: http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html.
I'd recommend creating an edited version of the robots.txt file yourself, specifically Allowing googlebot and others. Then send that with a link to the robotstxt.org site.
You may need to get the business owners involved. IT exists to enable the business, not strap it down so it can't move.
-
What you could do is just add Allow statements for the different Googlebots and the bots of other search engines. This will probably make the developers happy so they can keep other bots out of the door (although I doubt this would work and definitely don't think that this should be the option to keep spammers away, but that says more about the quality of development ;-)).
-
Yes, there are a ton of bad bots one may want to block. Can you show us the robots.txt file? If they aren't blocking legit search engine bots, you're probably okayish. If they are actually blocking all bots, you have cause for concern.
Can you give us a screenshot from GWT?
I use a program called Screaming Frog daily. It's not malicious, off the shelf. I just want to crawl and gather meta data. I can tell it to disregard robots.txt. It will crawl a site until it hit's something password protected. There's not much any robots.txt can do about it, as it can also spoof user agents.
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
-
Is robots met tag a more reliable than robots.txt at preventing indexing by Google?
What's your experience of using robots meta tag v robots.txt when it comes to a stand alone solution to prevent Google indexing? I am pretty sure robots meta tag is more reliable - going on own experiences, I have never experience any probs with robots meta tags but plenty with robots.txt as a stand alone solution. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Need help understanding "Clone sites"
I just read an article about Panda and it warned against against Clone sites: "Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014)" I don't have any clone sites, but there are dozens of sites with imitations of mine. We were the first in the area of interest, and then all these other sites that imitated us popped up. None are exact replicas. But many have spun some of our articles and used them to create their sites; the site structures are not identical though. Google seems to know we are the original site on the topic since we are ranked #1 for most terms. Would these be considered clone sites in their eyes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Content Marketing: Use of the words "guest post" in outreach email
Hello, I'm marketing a useful article in our niche, appealing to the humanitarian side of things and I always show I'm a reciprocator. Should my wording in my outreach email be: ...to write a guest post around this article: http://... Or should I just ask if they want help with content and go from there? In other words, should I always call it a guest post for maximum conversions? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com (google penguin)?
I have a couple of partial match domains in the format KEYOWRDdiscount.com and also the website name resembles domain name. "Car Discount" is not my website but just an example to illustrate:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com?
Should I try to modify existing external anchor texts to "CarDiscount" or "CarDiscount.com" instead of "Car Discount" Do you know of any cases where such anchor texts coinciding with partial match domain were likely reason for penguin penalization? Thanks.0 -
Could a HTML <select>with large numbers of <option value="<url>">'s affect my organic rankings</option></select>
Hi there, I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York. Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York. My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue. The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element. | <select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;"> <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option> <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option> <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option> <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option> <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option> <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option> <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option> <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select> Many thanks Mike |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Can I use a "no index, follow" command in a robot.txt file for a certain parameter on a domain?
I have a site that produces thousands of pages via file uploads. These pages are then linked to by users for others to download what they have uploaded. Naturally, the client has blocked the parameter which precedes these pages in an attempt to keep them from being indexed. What they did not consider, was they these pages are attracting hundreds of thousands of links that are not passing any authority to the main domain because they're being blocked in robots.txt Can I allow google to follow, but NOT index these pages via a robots.txt file --- or would this have to be done on a page by page basis?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PapaRelevance0 -
Any advice on acquiring "jump to" via anchor link text?
Google says these types of references are generated algorithmically and that users should include a table of contents & descriptive anchor link text. Is there anything else we should take into consideration? Also, does anyone know how this works with pagination? Due to the design of our site, we can't make one really long article, but would need to divide it up into several 'pages'--even though it would all live on one URL (we'd use the # for pagination). Thank you in advance for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html I have a couple questions: Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling? Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0