What is the sense of robots.txt?
-
Using robots.txt to prevent search engine from indexing the page is not a good idea. so what is the sense of robots.txt? just for attracting robots to crawl sitemap?
-
While your robots.txt file is not the best means to control search engines, it does have a purpose. To respond to your questions:
-
the file does not "attract" any robots, but robots who do visit can learn a bit about your site and understand what content you don't wish to be crawled
-
you can block parts of your site that you feel have no value for indexing such as Keri mentioned your "print" version of pages, or overlays pages, or login pages, etc.
The idea is that you own the website, and you can have a measure of control over it. You can disallow specific crawlers, etc. although it's up to each crawler whether they actually respect your wishes.
More details can be read at: http://www.robotstxt.org/
-
-
There are often times pages you don't want indexed, and that's what robots.txt is there for. These are just some things you may not want indexed:
- Premium content for subscription-only members
- Your admin directory
- Printable versions of pages
- Development servers
You keep things you don't want out of the index, and you also don't waste the crawl budgets of the search engines on stuff that's not what you want in the engines in the first place.
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
-
Role of Robots.txt and Search Console parameters settings
Hi, wondering if anyone can point me to resources or explain the difference between these two. If a site has url parameters disallowed in Robots.txt is it redundant to edit settings in Search Console parameters to anything other than "Let Googlebot Decide"?
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Robots file set up
The robots file looks like it has been set up in a very messy way.
Technical SEO | | mcwork
I understand the # will comment out a line, does this mean the sitemap would
not be picked up?
Disallow: /js/ should this be allowed like /*.js$
Disallow: /media/wysiwyg/ - this seems to be causing alerts in webmaster tools as it can not access
the images within.
Can anyone help me clean this up please #Sitemap: https://examplesite.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10 Allowable Index Mind that Allow is not an official standard Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Allow: /catalogsearch/result/ Allow: /media/catalog/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /media/captcha/ Disallow: /media/catalog/ #Disallow: /media/css/
#Disallow: /media/css_secure/
Disallow: /media/customer/
Disallow: /media/dhl/
Disallow: /media/downloadable/
Disallow: /media/import/
#Disallow: /media/js/
Disallow: /media/pdf/
Disallow: /media/sales/
Disallow: /media/tmp/
Disallow: /media/wysiwyg/
Disallow: /media/xmlconnect/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /shell/
#Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: */catalog/product/upload/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt
Disallow: /get.php # Magento 1.5+ Paths (no clean URLs) #Disallow: /.js$
#Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
Disallow: /rss*
Disallow: /*PHPSESSID Disallow: /:
Disallow: /😘 User-agent: Fatbot
Disallow: / User-agent: TwengaBot-2.0
Disallow: /0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
Robots.txt
Google Webmaster Tools say our website's have low-quality pages, so we have created a robots.txt file and listed all URL’s that we want to remove from Google index. Is this enough for the solve problem?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Un-Indexing a Page without robots.txt or access to HEAD
I am in a situation where a page was pushed live (Went live for an hour and then taken down) before it was supposed to go live. Now normally I would utilize the robots.txt or but I do not have access to either and putting a request in will not suffice as it is against protocol with the CMS. So basically I am left to just utilizing the and I cannot seem to find a nice way to play with the SE to get this un-indexed. I know for this instance I could go to GWT and do it but for clients that do not have GWT and for all the other SE's how could I do this? Here is the big question here: What if I have a promotional page that I don't want indexed and am met with these same limitations? Is there anything to do here?
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Competition links make no sense
Hello everybody, I used the open site explorer to check where my competitor has links and try to put mine there too. However I am extremely confused with the results. Eg the first link to my competitor coming from a domain with authority 91, is a download file. The other one is a link from ups, the courier service. When I click on it I get an access denied.The other one comes from samsung and when I click on it, I download an swf file. Next one, fcc.gov and it downloads a wp file. If I keep clicking on these links, in the end I am going to get a virus or something and learn nothing about what my competitor does. Any one have a clue how they managed to get linked like that?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0 -
Severe rank drop due to overwritten robots.txt
Hi, Last week we made a change to drupal core for an update to our website. We accidentally overwrote our good robots.txt that blocked hundreds of pages with the default drupal robots.txt. Several hours after that happened (and we didn't catch the mistake) our rankings dropped from mostly first, second place in Google organic to bottom and mid first page. Basically I believe we flooded the index with very low quality pages at once and threw a red flag and we got de-ranked. We have since fixed the robots.txt and have been re-crawled but have not seen a return in rank. Would this be a safe assumption of what happened? I haven't seen any other sites getting hit in the retail vertical yet in regards to any Panda 2.3 type of update. Will we see a return in our results anytime soon? Thanks, Justin
Technical SEO | | BrettKrasnove0