Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Multiple robots.txt files on server

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Multiple robots.txt files on server

    Technical SEO
    5
    7
    3720
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • mjukhud
      mjukhud last edited by

      Hi!

      I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step.

      One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names:

      robots.txt (original dupplicate)
      robots.txt-Original (original)
      robots.txt-NEW (other content)
      robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate)

      Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • peakdistrictseo
        peakdistrictseo last edited by

        So what's the best policy if a site uses an e-commerce platform like Magento, which has a robots file, but also has a Wordpress blog installed to another folder. eg: /blog and uses a plugin like YOAST which generated a robots file of the Wordpress installation.

        Then you have 2 robots files, is this detrimental or no big deal?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • mjukhud
          mjukhud @seoman10 last edited by

          Thanks very much for the help!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • mjukhud
            mjukhud last edited by

            Thanks very much for the help!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • seoman10
              seoman10 last edited by

              Keep a backup and remove them.

              Search engines are only going to look at the file which is exactly called robots.txt variations of file name will be ignored.

              Do make sure the entries are correct in the main one though, you don't want Google crawling admin pages or other confidential areas of the site.

              mjukhud 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • mjukhud
                mjukhud @Mustansar last edited by

                Hi, thanks for the answer and help!

                Well, I only have one domain that has a webpage and no subdomains active (no blog-subdomain or similar) - so how can I configure that to the situation? Can I just remove all and upload the one I want, maybe?

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Mustansar
                  Mustansar last edited by

                  That's a good question, EMS.  The robots.txt protocol can get kind of 
                  confusing when you think about it too long, and it sounds like you've 
                  thought about this a bit.  However, in this case, it might help to 
                  look at robots.txt from the perspective of the spider.

                  When a spider finds a URL, it takes the whole domain name (everything 
                  between 'http://' and the next '/'), then sticks a '/robots.txt' on 
                  the end of it and looks for that file.  If that file exists, then the 
                  spider should read it to see where it is allowed to crawl.

                  In your case, Googlebot, or any other spider, should try to access 
                  three URLs: domainA.com/robots.txt, domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt, 
                  and domainB.com/robots.txt.  The rules in each are treated as 
                  separate, so disallowing robots from domainA.com/ should result in 
                  domainA.com/ being removed from search results while 
                  domainB.domainA.com/ remains unaffected, which does not sound like not 
                  something you want.

                  The problem you might have with the setup you have described is this-- 
                  in order to keep domainB.domainA.com out of the results, you would 
                  need to have domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt exclude robots, while 
                  domainB.com/robots.txt welcomes them.  This means that you would need 
                  to have a way to make domainB.domainA.com/ and domainB.com/ serve 
                  different information, and judging from what you've described, you 
                  have not set up your server to do so yet.

                  Of course, it is always possible that I have assumed to much about 
                  your situation, so it is a good idea to use Google's robots.txt 
                  analysis tool (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8475
                  ) to see if your robots.txt files already produce the results you 
                  want.

                  If using robots.txt files doesn't solve the problem, and assuming that 
                  you want to continue hosting all of your content on domainA.com, one 
                  strategy you really should look into would be setting up a 301 
                  redirect from the pages on domainB.domainA.com/ to domainB.com/ .  If 
                  you need more advice on how to do this with your server software, your 
                  hosting company's tech support would definitely be the best place to 
                  start, but this group is here to help if more isues arise. 🙂

                  Hope that helps!

                  mjukhud 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • Damian_Ed 0

                    Unsolved Temporary redirect from 302 to 301 for PNG File?

                    302 temporary riderect 301 http status image issue

                    #302HTTP #temporaryredirect
                    Hi everyone, Recently I have faced a crawl issue with my media images on website. For example this page url https://intreface.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Horion-screen-side-2.png has 302 HTTP Status and the recommendation is to change it 301. I have read the article on temporary redirections here:
                    https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection?_ga=2.45324708.1293586627.1702571936-916254120.1702571936
                    but its not written here how to redirect in my HTML 1 image url not the landing page.
                    Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.02.40.png
                    I have messaged to MOZ Support but they recommended to go for the MOZ Community!
                    Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.06.02.png Could you assist me wit this issue please? I can reach HTTML of the necessary page and change what I need for permanent redirection but firstly I need to understand how to do that correctly.

                    Technical SEO | | Damian_Ed 0
                    0
                  • AndyKubrin

                    Robots.txt allows wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

                    Hello, Mozzers!
                    I noticed something peculiar in the robots.txt used by one of my clients: Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php What would be the purpose of allowing a search engine to crawl this file?
                    Is it OK? Should I do something about it?
                    Everything else on /wp-admin/ is disallowed.
                    Thanks in advance for your help.
                    -AK:

                    Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin
                    2
                  • hammadrafique

                    Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?

                    I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png

                    Technical SEO | | hammadrafique
                    0
                  • jmueller

                    Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?

                    Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
                    our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
                    Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
                    The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
                    First?
                    Last?
                    None? Thanks a lot,
                    Jan

                    Technical SEO | | jmueller
                    0
                  • Webmaster123

                    I accidentally blocked Google with Robots.txt. What next?

                    Last week I uploaded my site and forgot to remove the robots.txt file with this text: User-agent: * Disallow: / I dropped from page 11 on my main keywords to past page 50. I caught it 2-3 days later and have now fixed it. I re-imported my site map with Webmaster Tools and I also did a Fetch as Google through Webmaster Tools. I tweeted out my URL to hopefully get Google to crawl it faster too. Webmaster Tools no longer says that the site is experiencing outages, but when I look at my blocked URLs it still says 249 are blocked. That's actually gone up since I made the fix. In the Google search results, it still no longer has my page title and the description still says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." How will this affect me long-term? When will I recover my rankings? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks for your input! www.decalsforthewall.com

                    Technical SEO | | Webmaster123
                    0
                  • ShearingsGroup

                    Should I block robots from URLs containing query strings?

                    I'm about to block off all URLs that have a query string using robots.txt. They're mostly URLs with coremetrics tags and other referrer info. I figured that search engines don't need to see these as they're always better off with the original URL. Might there be any downside to this that I need to consider? Appreciate your help / experiences on this one. Thanks Jenni

                    Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup
                    0
                  • irvingw

                    Allow or Disallow First in Robots.txt

                    If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command? example: Allow: /models/ford///page* Disallow: /models////page

                    Technical SEO | | irvingw
                    0
                  • rosstaylor

                    Bing rank drop off for multiple sites

                    Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com

                    Technical SEO | | rosstaylor
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.