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. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

    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.

    Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    16
    111626
    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.
    • kylesuss
      kylesuss last edited by

      Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

      I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 12
      • kylesuss
        kylesuss @kylesuss last edited by

        Awesome! That did the trick -- thanks for your help. The site is no longer listed 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • sprynewmedia
          sprynewmedia @kylesuss last edited by

          Fact is, the robots file alone will never work (the link has a good explanation why - short form: all it does is stop the bots from indexing again).

          Best to request removal then wait a few days.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
          • kylesuss
            kylesuss @kylesuss last edited by

            Yeah. As of yet, the site has not been de-indexed. We placed the conditional rule in htaccess and are getting different robots.txt files for the domain and subdomain -- so that works. But I've never done this before so I don't know how long it's supposed to take?

            I'll try to verify via Webmaster Tools to speed up the process. Thanks

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • sprynewmedia
              sprynewmedia @kylesuss last edited by

              You should do a remove request in Google Webmaster Tools.  You have to first verify the sub-domain then request the removal.

              See this post on why the robots file alone won't work...

              http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • kylesuss
                kylesuss @kylesuss last edited by

                Awesome. We used your second idea and so far it looks like it is working exactly how we want. Thanks for the idea.

                Will report back to confirm that the subdomain has been de-indexed.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • sprynewmedia
                  sprynewmedia @kylesuss last edited by

                  Option 1 could come with a small performance hit if you have a lot of txt files being used on the server.

                  There shouldn't be any negative side effects to option 2 if the rewrite is clean (IE not accidently a redirect) and the content of the two files are robots compliant.

                  Good luck

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • kylesuss
                    kylesuss @sprynewmedia last edited by

                    Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely have to do a bit more research into this one to make sure that it doesn't have any negative side effects before implementation

                    sprynewmedia kylesuss 6 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • kylesuss
                      kylesuss @john4math last edited by

                      We have a plugin right now that places canonical tags, but unfortunately, the canonical for the subdomain points to the subdomain. I'll look around to see if I can tweak the settings

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

                        Sounds like (from other discussions) you may be stuck requiring a dynamic robot.txt file which detects what domain the bot is on and changes the content accordingly.  This means the server has to run all .txt file as (I presume) PHP.

                        Or, you could conditionally rewrite the /robot.txt URL to a new file according to sub-domain

                        RewriteEngine on
                        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.website.com$
                        RewriteRule ^robotx.txt$ robots-subdomain.txt

                        Then add:

                        User-agent: *
                        Disallow: /

                        to the robots-subdomain.txt file

                        (untested)

                        kylesuss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                        • john4math
                          john4math last edited by

                          Placing canonical tags isn't an option?  Detect that the page is being viewed through the subdomain, and if so, write the canonical tag on the page back to the root domain?

                          Or, just place a canonical tag on every page pointing back to the root domain (so the subdomain and root domain pages would both have them).  Apparently, it's ok to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself.  I haven't tried this, but if Matt Cutts says it's ok...

                          kylesuss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • kylesuss
                            kylesuss @AdoptionHelp last edited by

                            Hey Ryan,

                            I wasn't directly involved with the decision to create the subdomain, but I'm told that it is necessary to create in order to bypass certain elements that were affecting the root domain.

                            Nevertheless, it is a blog and the users now need to login to the subdomain in order to access the Wordpress backend to bypass those elements. Traffic for the site still goes to the root domain.

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

                              They both point to the same location on the server? So there's not a different folder for the subdomain?

                              If that's the case then I suggest adding a rule to your htaccess file to 301 the subdomain back to the main domain in exactly the same way people redirect from non-www to www or vice-versa. However, you should ask why the server is configured to have a duplicate subdomain? You might just edit your apache settings to get rid of that subdomain (usually done through a cpanel interface).

                              Here is what your htaccess might look like:

                              <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
                                # Redirect non-www to wwww
                                RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.org [NC]
                                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

                              kylesuss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                              • AndyKuiper
                                AndyKuiper last edited by

                                Not to me LOL 🙂 I think you'll need someone with a bit more expertise in this area than I to assist in this case. Kyle, I'm sorry I couldn't offer more assistance... but I don't want to tell you something if I'm not 100% sure. I suspect one of the many bright SEOmozer's will quickly come to the rescue on this one.

                                Andy 🙂

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • kylesuss
                                  kylesuss @AndyKuiper last edited by

                                  Hey Andy,

                                  Herein lies the problem. Since the domain and subdomain point to the exact same place, they both utilize the same robots.txt file.

                                  Does that make sense?

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

                                    Hi Kyle 🙂 Yes, you can block an entire subdomain via robots.txt, however you'll need to create a robots.txt file and place it in the root of the subdomain, then add the code to direct the bots to stay away from the entire subdomain's content.

                                    User-agent: *
                                    Disallow: /

                                    hope this helps 🙂

                                    kylesuss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                                    • 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

                                    • jamiegriz

                                      SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow

                                      I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz
                                      0
                                    • Gabriele_Layoutweb

                                      If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                                      If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb
                                      0
                                    • jmorehouse

                                      Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?

                                      Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse
                                      0
                                    • ideasandpixels

                                      Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?

                                      One of my clients has about 40 franchisees who are going to have their own sites on a WordPress multisite installation. The question they're wondering: should these be on subdirectories (thesite.com/this-franchise) or on subdomains (this-franchise.thesite.com)? Which is best for SEO? Thanks!

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ideasandpixels
                                      0
                                    • YairSpolter

                                      Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?

                                      When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter
                                      0
                                    • Shawn124

                                      Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?

                                      Hello, I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website.  Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links. I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com".  I used to have 3,000! Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000. This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn124
                                      0
                                    • Rubix

                                      Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?

                                      Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix
                                      0
                                    • PEnterprises

                                      Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?

                                      I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises
                                      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.