Robots.txt - Googlebot - Allow... what's it for?
-
Hello - I just came across this in robots.txt for the first time, and was wondering why it is used? Why would you have to proactively tell Googlebot to crawl JS/CSS and why would you want it to? Any help would be much appreciated - thanks, Luke
User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /.js
Allow: /.css
-
Thanks Tom - that's very useful - appreciated
- and thanks also Clever PhD re: the robots.txt tester info - Luke
-
Just as a follow-up to Tom's great post. If you were wanting to test a robots.txt setup, especially if you were using a wildcard or using an allow combined with a disallow, Google Search Console under the Crawl section has a robots.txt Tester. You will see your most recent robots.txt file there that Google has a copy of. You can then modify that version and then enter a URL at the bottom to see if everything is set correctly or not. It is pretty handy, especially if you have a big robots.txt file. Note that this tool does not change how Google crawls your site or your robots.txt file, it is just for testing. Once you find the configuration that works, you would still need to update the robots.txt on your server.
-
Hi Luke
As you have correctly assumed, that particular robots command would be pointless.
The Googlebot does follow allow commands (while other ones do not), but it should only be used if it is an exception to a disallow rule.
So, for example, if you had a rule that blocked pages within a sub-directory, with:
Disallow: /example/*
You could create an allow rule that indexes a specific page within that directory to be indexed, like:
Allow: /example/page.html
Couple of things to point out here. "At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule." (Google Source). In this example, because the more specific rule is the allow rule, that will prevail. It is also best practice to put your "allow" rules at the top of the robots.txt file.
But in your example, if they have allow rules for JS and CSS files without having disavow rules for those directories/paths etc - it's a waste of space. Google will attempt to crawl anything it can by default - unless you disavow access.
TL;DR - You don't need to proactively tell Google to crawl CSS and JS - it will by default.
Hope this helps.
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 & Disallow: /*? Question!
Hi, I have a site where they have: Disallow: /*? Problem is we need the following indexed: ?utm_source=google_shopping What would the best solution be? I have read: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: ?utm_source=google_shopping
Disallow: /*? Any ideas?0 -
Is it necessary to use Google's Structured Data Markup or alternative for my B2B site?
Hi, We are in the process of going through a re-design for our site. Am trying to understand if we need to use some sort of structured data either from Google Structured data or schema. org?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Krausch0 -
Default Robots.txt in WordPress - Should i change it??
I have a WordPress site as using theme Genesis i am using default robots.txt. that has a line Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, is it okay or any problem. Should i change it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
Why are our sites top landing pages URL's that no longer exist and retrun 404 errors?
Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs. I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions. How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Is it worth submitting a blog's RSS feed...
to as many RSS feed directories as possible? Or would this have a similar negative impact that you'd get from submitting a site to loads to "potentially spammy" site directories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey0 -
Best solution to get mass URl's out the SE's index
Hi, I've got an issue where our web developers have made a mistake on our website by messing up some URL's . Because our site works dynamically IE the URL's generated on a page are relevant to the current URL it ment the problem URL linked out to more problem URL's - effectively replicating an entire website directory under problem URL's - this has caused tens of thousands of URL's in SE's indexes which shouldn't be there. So say for example the problem URL's are like www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/ It seems I can correct this by doing the following: 1/. Use Robots.txt to disallow access to /incorrect-directory/* 2/. 301 the urls like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/folder1/page1/ 3/. 301 URL's to the root correct directory like this:
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page2/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder2/ 301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/ Which method do you think is the best solution? - I doubt there is any link juice benifit from 301'ing URL's as there shouldn't be any external links pointing to the wrong URL's.0 -
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