Robots.txt - Googlebot - Allow... what's it for?
-
Hello - I just came across this in robots.txt for the first time, and was wondering why it is used? Why would you have to proactively tell Googlebot to crawl JS/CSS and why would you want it to? Any help would be much appreciated - thanks, Luke
User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /.js
Allow: /.css
-
Thanks Tom - that's very useful - appreciated
- and thanks also Clever PhD re: the robots.txt tester info - Luke
-
Just as a follow-up to Tom's great post. If you were wanting to test a robots.txt setup, especially if you were using a wildcard or using an allow combined with a disallow, Google Search Console under the Crawl section has a robots.txt Tester. You will see your most recent robots.txt file there that Google has a copy of. You can then modify that version and then enter a URL at the bottom to see if everything is set correctly or not. It is pretty handy, especially if you have a big robots.txt file. Note that this tool does not change how Google crawls your site or your robots.txt file, it is just for testing. Once you find the configuration that works, you would still need to update the robots.txt on your server.
-
Hi Luke
As you have correctly assumed, that particular robots command would be pointless.
The Googlebot does follow allow commands (while other ones do not), but it should only be used if it is an exception to a disallow rule.
So, for example, if you had a rule that blocked pages within a sub-directory, with:
Disallow: /example/*
You could create an allow rule that indexes a specific page within that directory to be indexed, like:
Allow: /example/page.html
Couple of things to point out here. "At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule." (Google Source). In this example, because the more specific rule is the allow rule, that will prevail. It is also best practice to put your "allow" rules at the top of the robots.txt file.
But in your example, if they have allow rules for JS and CSS files without having disavow rules for those directories/paths etc - it's a waste of space. Google will attempt to crawl anything it can by default - unless you disavow access.
TL;DR - You don't need to proactively tell Google to crawl CSS and JS - it will by default.
Hope this helps.
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
-
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Hreflang targeted website using the root directory's description & title
Hi there, Recently I applied the href lang tags like so: Unfortunately, the Australian site uses the same description and title as the US site (which was the root directory initially), am i doing something wrong? Would appreciate any response, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oliverkuchies0 -
Can I swap a website yet keep it's high ranking for a competitive keyword?
Couldn't fit the entire question in the main bit so the explanation is here: Working on a client's website which is hosted by volusion and also been doing SEO for them for about a year. Now we've finally got them ranking at the lower end of page 1 (around 10+) for their main keyword. They now want to move from volusion over to Amazon Web Store 😢 which seems to be an SEO nightmare from even my basic understanding of SEO. From looking at the coding and the way Amazon Web store is built on top of how restricted you are from doing anything with it, I am almost certain the shop will be extremely difficult to optimise and we will have to completely change nearly all of the content. Finally! the actual question; I was thinking I could get them to delay their move to Amazon webstore until they are ranking in the top 5 for this top keyword. Once they switch over, i assume they'll keep this ranking for at least a short while? This keyword attracts a high volume of traffic and if this traffic is clicking on the result for their website, and google sees that people are finding this website valuable (not clicking back onto google results). Will they be able hold onto this high ranking? Basically what I'm asking is, this will be a terrible outdated badly SEO'd shop, but if a high volume of people are clicking on it and staying on it from their lingering ranking will Google just let it stay at the top? A massive amount of gratitude in advance for anyone who tries to help with this! 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acecream0 -
Refocusing a site's conent
Here's a question I was asked recently, and I can really see going either way, but want to double check my preference. The site has been around for years and over that time expanded it's content to a variety of areas that are not really core to it's mission, income or themed content. These jettisonable other areas have a fair amount of built up authority but don't really contribute anything to the site's bottom line. The site is considering what to do with these off-theme pages and the two options seem to be: Leave them in place, but make them hard to find for users, thus preserving their authority as an inlink to other core pages. or... Just move on and 301 the pages to whatever is half-way relevant. The 301 the pages camp seems to believe that making the site's existing/remaining content focused on three or four narrower areas will have benefits for what Google sees the site as being about. So, instead of being about 12 different things that aren't too related to each other, the site will be about 3 or 4 things that are kinda related to eachother. Personally, I'm not eager to let go of old pages because they do produce some traffic and have some authority value to help the core pages via in-context and navigation links. On the other hand, maybe focusing more would have benefits search benefits. What do think? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What's next?
What's next with the tool? For SEOmoz users that have gotten their Crawl Diagnostics and On-Page issues under control, what's next? In other words, what do long-time SEOmoz users do with the tool? What ongoing weekly value do they get? Ranking reports? Link Analysis? It took me four weeks to resolve all my simple issues, which you can see in Crawl Diagnostics and On-Page reports. (It would have only take one week, if the tool crawled all my pages upon demand instead of only once a week.) But now that all my simple issues are resolved, I'm not sure what else to do with the tool. I don't want to hastily cancel the service, but I also don't know what else to do... I'd even pay more for an actual human to look in on me from time to time and tell me what to do next. But I'm self-motivating, so I'll try to figure it out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raywhite0 -
.com Outranking my ccTLD's and cannot figure out why.
So I have a client that has a number of sites for a number of different countries with their specific ccTLD. They also have a .com in the US. The problem is that the UK site hardly ranks for anything while the .com ranks for a ton in the UK. I have setup GWT for the UK and the .com to be specific to their geographic locations. So I have the ccTLD and I have GWT showing where I want these sites to rank. Problem is it apparently is not working....Any clues as to what else I could do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
How to Handel Fashion Jewelry Stores's Listings?
Hi ! I m working with few brands who hardly make same designs again... which is good things for my buyers.. Buy i m worrying how i can handle this keeping seo in mind? should i delete pages after product is sold out? or there is some other better way to handle this? Thanks, Vinku
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinku0 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0