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  4. One robots.txt file for multiple sites?

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One robots.txt file for multiple sites?

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  • renalynd27
    renalynd27 last edited by Mar 29, 2016, 12:20 PM

    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

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • RyanPurkey
      RyanPurkey last edited by Mar 29, 2016, 1:01 PM Mar 29, 2016, 1:01 PM

      Hi Rena. Yes, if both sites are separate domains that you want to use in different ways, then you should place a different robots.txt file in each domain root so that they're accessible at xyz.com/robots.txt and abc.com/robots.txt.  Cheers!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • LoganRay
        LoganRay last edited by Mar 29, 2016, 1:34 PM Mar 29, 2016, 12:52 PM

        Hi Rena,

        You technically can do that, but it's not recommended - for the exact reason you state above. More often than not, 2 sites aren't going to have the same set of disallow rules.

        Additionally, you should also be using robots.txt files to direct search engines to your XML sitemap, and if you're sharing a robots file, then you can't specify 2 different sitemaps on 2 different domains.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • GlobeRunner
          GlobeRunner last edited by Mar 29, 2016, 12:52 PM Mar 29, 2016, 12:52 PM

          Each individual website (and some subdomains if you add them) needs a unique robots.txt file. You can copy the same file and use it again and again on each site, but each one needs a robots.txt file.

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