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    4. Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?

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    Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Milian
      Milian last edited by

      Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match?

      e.g:

      I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block

      /fish
      /fish.html
      /fish/salmon.html
      /fishheads
      /fishheads/yummy.html
      /fish.php?id=anything

      But would it block?:

      en/fish
      en/fish.html
      en/fish/salmon.html
      en/fishheads
      en/fishheads/yummy.html
      **en/fish.php?id=anything

      (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier!

      As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as:

      http://www.example.com/BTS-something
      http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
      http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob

      But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as:

      http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
      http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy

      Thanks for listening

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

        Yes this is what I thought, but wanted some second opinions.

        Although I wouldn't actually need a wild card after BTS, as just leaving it open is the same as using a wildcard:

        /fish*..........  Equivalent to "/fish" -- the trailing wildcard is ignored. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

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

          You're right in with the **Disallow: /fish **in the robots file blocking all those initial links, but if you wanted to block everything inside the /en/ folder, you would need to do disallow: /en/fish

          You could use a wildcard in the robots.txt file to do something along the lines of Disallow: /BTS-*

          This _'should' _work, but it's always worth checking using a tool to make sure it's all implemented correctly. Distilled did a post a while back about a JS tool which allows you to test if robots.txt files work correctly which can be found here - http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/js-bookmarklet-for-checking-if-a-page-is-blocked-by-robots-txt/

          In addition to this, you could also use the 'blocked URLs' tool in GWT to see if the pages are successfully blocked once you've implemented the code.

          Hope this helps!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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