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.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • 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
    111718
    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

                                    • Ty1986

                                      How to create a smooth blog migration from subdomain to subfolder main?

                                      Hi mozzers, We have decided to migrate the blog subdomain to the domain's subfolder (blog.example.com to example.com/blog). To do this the most effective way and avoid impact SEO negatively I believe I have to follow this checklist: Create a list of all 301 redirects from blog.example.com/post-1 to example.com/post-1 Make sure title tags remain the same on main domain Make sure internal links remain the same Is there something else I am missing? Any other best practices? I also would like to have all blog post as AMPs. Any recommendations if this something we should do since we are not a media site? Any other tips on successfully implementing those types of pages? Thanks

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty1986
                                      1
                                    • cos2030

                                      How can I get Bing to index my subdomain correctly?

                                      Hi guys, My website exists on a subdomain (i.e. https://website.subdomain.com) and is being indexed correctly on all search engines except Bing and Duck Duck Go, which list 'https://www.website.subdomain.com'. Unfortunately my subdomain isn't configured for www (the domain is out of my control), so searchers are seeing a server error when clicking on my homepage in the SERPs. I have verified the site successfully in Bing Webmaster Tools, but it still shows up incorrectly. Does anyone have any advice on how I could fix this issue? Thank you!

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos2030
                                      0
                                    • Kingalan1

                                      Meta Robot Tag:Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir

                                      When should "Noodp" and "Noydir" meta robot tag be used? I have hundreds or URLs for real estate listings on my site that simply use "Index", Follow" without using Noodp and Noydir. Should the listing pages use these Noodp and Noydr also? All major landing pages use Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir. Is this the best setting in terms of ranking and SEO. Thanks, Alan

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                                      0
                                    • MarkWill

                                      Blog subdomain not redirecting

                                      Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill
                                      0
                                    • ecerbone

                                      Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?

                                      I want to put blog on my site.  The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog).  I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website).   The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks.  That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone
                                      0
                                    • nodiffrei

                                      Using subdomains for related landing pages?

                                      Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice...  I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nodiffrei
                                      0
                                    • nicole.healthline

                                      Best way to block a search engine from crawling a link?

                                      If we have one page on our site that is is only linked to by one other page, what is the best way to block crawler access to that page? I know we could set the link to "nofollow" and that would prevent the crawler from passing any authority, and we can set the page to "noindex" to prevent it from appearing in search results, but what is the best way to prevent the crawler from accessing that one link?

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                                      0
                                    • iAnalyst.com

                                      Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?

                                      What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com
                                      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
                                    • Digital Marketers
                                    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.