Robots.txt blocking Addon Domains
-
I have this site as my primary domain: http://www.libertyresourcedirectory.com/
I don't want to give spiders access to the site at all so I tried to do a simple Disallow: / in the robots.txt. As a test I tried to crawl it with Screaming Frog afterwards and it didn't do anything. (Excellent.)
However, there's a problem. In GWT, I got an alert that Google couldn't crawl ANY of my sites because of robots.txt issues. Changing the robots.txt on my primary domain, changed it for ALL my addon domains. (Ex. http://ethanglover.biz/ ) From a directory point of view, this makes sense, from a spider point of view, it doesn't.
As a solution, I changed the robots.txt file back and added a robots meta tag to the primary domain. (noindex, nofollow). But this doesn't seem to be having any effect. As I understand it, the robots.txt takes priority.
How can I separate all this out to allow domains to have different rules? I've tried uploading a separate robots.txt to the addon domain folders, but it's completely ignored. Even going to ethanglover.biz/robots.txt gave me the primary domain version of the file. (SERIOUSLY! I've tested this 100 times in many ways.)
Has anyone experienced this? Am I in the twilight zone? Any known fixes? Thanks.
Proof I'm not crazy in attached video.
-
Sort of resolved, maybe the wrong place to ask any further. The above is a working fix for what seems like a legit bug, I'll update if WordPress forums say anything.
-
No, I don't like to waste memory and bandwidth. If you can do it yourself, you should probably do it yourself. I'm moving this question to WordPress.
-
Hi Ethan
One thing I have heard of people trying is a plugin that serves dynamic robots.txt files. I don't use add-on sites so you will probably have to test the behavior. He is an example of one of the plugins.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
hope this helps,
Anthony -
Ethan
It sounds like the issue has been resolved. I'm not too familiar with domain add-ons but if you have any more trouble let us know and I'll be sure another Moz Associate takes a look.
-Dan (Moz Associate)
-
-
Hi Ethan
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was thinking you could drop the use of the robots.txt all together and just use the Meta Tag approach since it seems that the robots.txt is having a global impact to your sites. Search engines will still crawl the pages, but it should exclude them from the index.
Hope this helps,
Anthony -
Anthony, based on your response it's obvious you haven't read the question or follow-up.
-
Hi Ethan
One approach may be to try using the Robots Meta Tag. You can use noindex to tell Google not to index. This won't prevent crawling, but Google should respect the request to not index your site. I have included a good guide below to get you started.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag
Hope this helps,
Anthony B
Biondo Creative
biondocreative.com -
I've found a quick fix for now: http://ethanglover.biz/using-robots-txt-with-addon-domains/
This is still an issue, and it may be exclusive to WordPress.
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
-
Robots.txt error
Moz Crawler is not able to access the robots.txt due to server error. Please advice on how to tackle the server error.
Technical SEO | | Shanidel0 -
Is there a limit to how many URLs you can put in a robots.txt file?
We have a site that has way too many urls caused by our crawlable faceted navigation. We are trying to purge 90% of our urls from the indexes. We put no index tags on the url combinations that we do no want indexed anymore, but it is taking google way too long to find the no index tags. Meanwhile we are getting hit with excessive url warnings and have been it by Panda. Would it help speed the process of purging urls if we added the urls to the robots.txt file? Could this cause any issues for us? Could it have the opposite effect and block the crawler from finding the urls, but not purge them from the index? The list could be in excess of 100MM urls.
Technical SEO | | kcb81780 -
Robots.txt - "File does not appear to be valid"
Good afternoon Mozzers! I've got a weird problem with one of the sites I'm dealing with. For some reason, one of the developers changed the robots.txt file to disavow every site on the page - not a wise move! To rectify this, we uploaded the new robots.txt file to the domain's root as per Webmaster Tool's instructions. The live file is: User-agent: * (http://www.savistobathrooms.co.uk/robots.txt) I've submitted the new file in Webmaster Tools and it's pulling it through correctly in the editor. However, Webmaster Tools is not happy with it, for some reason. I've attached an image of the error. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm managing another site with the exact same robots.txt file and there are no issues. Cheers, Lewis FNcK2YQ
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
I have a sub domain that has live content on it but the root domain redirects to another URL. I know this is not great but what are the implications?
I have a subdomain that is populated and has content. The root domain that the sub lives on redirects to an entirely different URL. I am trying to make a case as to why this isn't great besides the fact that it is just weird user experiences. What are the SEO implications etc. Would any equity that gets built up on the subdomain get passed along in the redirect? Or will there be indexation issues with Google? Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | mjsikorsky0 -
Moving multiple domains into one domain
Hi, We're currently moving a group of websites (approximately 12) under one domain so we've moved from www.example.de , www.example.co.uk , www.example.com to www.example.com/de www.example.com/uk and so on. However I have read an article online today saying that this can lead to crawling complications. Has anyone done something similar and if there were any issues how did you overcome them? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Domain hacked and redirected to another domain
2 weeks ago my home page plus some others had a 301 redirect to another cloned domain for about 1 week (due to a hack).The original pages were then de-indexed and the new bad domain was indexed and in effect stole my rankings.Then the 301 was removed/cleaned from my domain and the bad domain was fully de-indexed via a request I made in WMT (this was 1 week ago).Then my pages came back into the index but without any ranking power (as if it's just in the supplemental index).It's been like this for a week now and the algorithms have not been able to correct it. So how do I get this damage undone or corrected? Can someone at Google reverse/cancel the 301 ranking transfer since the algorithms don't seem to be able to?I have the option to do a "Change of Address" in WMT from bad domain to my domain. But I don't think this would work properly because it says I also need to place a 301 on the bad domain back to mine. Would a change of address still work without the 301?Please advise/help what to do in order to get my rankings back to where they were.
Technical SEO | | Dantek0 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
Is robots.txt a must-have for 150 page well-structured site?
By looking in my logs I see dozens of 404 errors each day from different bots trying to load robots.txt. I have a small site (150 pages) with clean navigation that allows the bots to index the whole site (which they are doing). There are no secret areas I don't want the bots to find (the secret areas are behind a Login so the bots won't see them). I have used rel=nofollow for internal links that point to my Login page. Is there any reason to include a generic robots.txt file that contains "user-agent: *"? I have a minor reason: to stop getting 404 errors and clean up my error logs so I can find other issues that may exist. But I'm wondering if not having a robots.txt file is the same as some default blank file (or 1-line file giving all bots all access)?
Technical SEO | | scanlin0