Best way to create robots.txt for my website
-
How I can create robots.txt file for my website guitarcontrol.com ?
It is having login and Guitar lessons.
-
Hi,
First you need to understand your website need, you have to decide which part of your website should not be indexed or crawled by SE bots, like your website provides user login and user areas, if you are providing private dashboard for your user then it should be blocked by robots.txt (or you can use meta tag to prevent robots from crawling and indexing your particular page like ) or you can learn more about robots.txt here https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
Hope it helps
-
I see that you're on WordPress.
This CMS create "virtual" robots.txt. You can see this here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_OptimizationBut on your website there is error in robots.txt and you should see in web server log files (access and error) why this is happening. Also you may need looking .htaccess because something preventing this text file to be accessed.
There is alternative way for using robots.txt in WordPress. All you need is to create new and blank robots.txt in same folder and put this there:
User-agent: *
Disallow:Then save file and that's all. Now bad news - WP can't control indexing and crawling anymore.
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
-
Robots.txt vs. meta noindex, follow
Hi guys, I wander what your opinion is concerning exclution via the robots.txt file.
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
Do you advise to keep using this? For example: User-agent: *
Disallow: /sale/*
Disallow: /cart/*
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /wishlist/* Or do you prefer using the meta tag 'noindex, follow' instead?
I keep hearing different suggestions.
I'm just curious what your opinion / suggestion is. Regards,
Tom Vledder0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Is there any value in having a blank robots.txt file?
I've read an audit where the writer recommended creating and uploading a blank robots.txt file, there was no current file in place. Is there any merit in having a blank robots.txt file? What is the minimum you would include in a basic robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Robots.txt
www.mywebsite.com**/details/**home-to-mome-4596 www.mywebsite.com**/details/**home-moving-4599 www.mywebsite.com**/details/**1-bedroom-apartment-4601 www.mywebsite.com**/details/**4-bedroom-apartment-4612 We have so many pages like this, we do not want to Google crawl this pages So we added the following code to Robots.txt User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /details/ This code is correct?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
Robots.txt Syntax
Does the order of the robots.txt syntax matter in SEO? For example (are there potential problems with this format): User-agent: * Sitemap: Disallow: /form.htm Allow: / Disallow: /cgnet_directory
Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand0 -
What is the best way to change your sites folder structure?
Hi, Our site was originally created with a very flat folder structure - most of the pages are at the top level. Because we will adding more content I want to tidy up the structure first. I just wanted to check what the best way to go about this was. Is it best to: First configure all the new 301 redirects to point to the new pages, while leaving the actual links on our site pointing to the old pages. Then changing the links on the site after a few weeks. Configure the redirects and change the actual links on my website at the same time to point to the new locations. My thinking that if I go with option 1 route then I will give Google a chance to process all the redirects and change the locations in their index before I start pointing them to the new locations. But does it make any difference? What is the best wat to go about making this sort of change to minimize any loss in rankings, page rank etc? Thanks for the help.
Technical SEO | | Maximise0