Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file - will that have an impact on the way our site is crawled?
-
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file. All of their sitemap links are on a different domain and I'm wondering if this will have any impact on our searchability or potential rankings.
-
While that is kind of odd to do, it should not have any effect on your site's search engine rankings or visibility. Simply providing a sitemap file is not going to help or hurt rankings in any way. It will help them discover and crawl pages. That's all.
A sitemap file is not required at all, and in fact some sites don't have them--they rely on Google's spiders to crawl their site through the links on their site. The sitemap is only a tool to help them crawl.
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
-
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How long until I see an SEO impact from newly optimized site
We just recently launched a new version of our website. This new version allowed us to integrate research into technical SEO updates to enhance our search visibility. Based on experience from those viewing this post, what is a good average timeframe in which I should start seeing some effects from these changes in Google? I know this question is hard to answer because of all the variables that are part of the answer but I need something to take to the c-level as an estimate of what to expect. I figured experience might tell a good story here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Robots.txt - blocking JavaScript and CSS, best practice for Magento
Hi Mozzers, I'm looking for some feedback regarding best practices for setting up Robots.txt file in Magento. I'm concerned we are blocking bots from crawling essential information for page rank. My main concern comes with blocking JavaScript and CSS, are you supposed to block JavaScript and CSS or not? You can view our robots.txt file here Thanks, Blake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeapOfBelief0 -
If linking to contextual sites is beneficial for SE rankings, what impact does the re=“nofollow” attribute have when applied to these outbound contextual links?
Communities, opinion-formers, even Google representatives, seem to offer a consensus that linking to quality, relevant sites is good practice and therefore beneficial for SEO. Does this still apply when the outbound links are "nofollow"? Is there any good research on this out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielpressley0 -
Will adding 1000's of outbound links to just a few website impact rankings?
I manage a large website that hosts 1000's of business listings that comprise an area that covers 7 state counties. Currently a category page (such as lodging) hosts a group of listings which then link to it's own page. From these pages links are present directly to the business it represents. The client is proposing that we change all listings to link to the representative county website and remove the individual pages. This essentially would create 1000's of external links to 7 different websites and remove 1000's of pages from our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop
Does anyone have thoughts on how adding 1000's of links (potentially upwards of 3000) to only 7 websites (that I would deem relevant links) would affect SEO? I know if 1000's of links are added pointing to 1000's of websites the site can be considered a link farm, but I can't find any info online that speaks of a case like this.0 -
Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?
When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0
