Robots.txt Showing in SERP Results
-
Currently doing a technical audit for a website and when I search "Site:website.com -www" the only result is website.com/robots.txt
I was wondering if anyone else has come across this before -- or what this may mean from a technical audit standpoint.
Thank you!
-
nonsense. Search for https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Arobots.txt&pws=0
Some of the first results with visible robots.txt I see are:
I refuse to believe that "something is seriously wrong" with any of these sites.
-
It's quite common for Google to index robots.txt files. (and also, rather odd) But check out all of these robots.txt files:
https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Arobots.txt&pws=0&gl=us
So it's nothing to be alarmed by. With your particular query. "Site:website.com -www" it only shows pages indexed without the "www" so this just says that all the indexed pages most likely begin with www. The exception, of course, is the robots.txt file.
The bigger question for me is, why does Google cache robots.txt files? Oh well.
-
The robots.txt file should not show up. Sounds like there is something seriously wrong.
-
Did you also search for site:www.webiste.com? Are they blocking the site?What's in the actual robots file?
Also, does this happen when you search for the site in Bing?
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
-
Using one robots.txt for two websites
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemap Is this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
No descripton on Google/Yahoo/Bing, updated robots.txt - what is the turnaround time or next step for visible results?
Hello, New to the MOZ community and thrilled to be learning alongside all of you! One of our clients' sites is currently showing a 'blocked' meta description due to an old robots.txt file (eg: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt) We have updated the site's robots.txt to allow all bots. The meta tag has also been updated in WordPress (via the SEO Yoast plugin) See image here of Google listing and site URL: http://imgur.com/46wajJw I have also ensured that the most recent robots.txt has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools. When can we expect these results to update? Is there a step I may have overlooked? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | adamhdrb
Adam 46wajJw0 -
Homepage disappeared from Google Serp
I redirected my domain using this code in .htaccess : RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xxxx.com
Technical SEO | | digitalkiddie
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]/)index.(html?|php)(?[^\ ])?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]/)*)index.(html?|php)$ http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> A day after I did it, got an error in GWMT "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" and my homepage disappeared from the result pages. When I try to open Google cache of the homepage I got an error 404. I generated new robots.txt, uploaded it , now the error doesnt show but still my homepage is not in the serps. Its been 3 days. What should I do ? Thanks in advance "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" error? - Pro ...0 -
Meta-robots Nofollow
I don't understand Meta-robots Nofollow. Wordpress has my homepage set to this according to SEOMoz tool. Is this really bad?
Technical SEO | | hopkinspat1 -
How do you get a Google+ pic in your SERP snippet
Hi from from 20 degrees C 83% humidity wetherby UK 🙂 A few weeks back i decided i needed to get my pretty face appearing in my serps for www.davidclick.com But after having set up a Gppgle+ account and linking my site to the Google+ account i think I may have done something wrong 😞 I linked to the Google+ page via a footer link in www.davidclick.com but alas I'm not able to get my face in my SERP which this website has: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/google-plus-picJPGcopy.jpg So my question is please - "How do you get your Google+ account image to appear in the SERPS. Ta muchly,
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
David0 -
Restricted by robots.txt does this cause problems?
I have restricted around 1,500 links which are links to retailers website and links that affiliate links accorsing to webmaster tools Is this the right approach as I thought it would affect the link juice? or should I take the no follow out of the restricted by robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Help needed with robots.txt regarding wordpress!
Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched. http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743 http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240 These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes. IS there a reason I should block any pages contained in wodrpress? Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*/trackback Disallow: /*/feed Disallow: /*/comments Disallow: /? Disallow: /*? Disallow: /page/
Technical SEO | | ENSO
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed0