Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    2
    8
    1585
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • McTaggart
      McTaggart last edited by

      Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?*

      Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark?

      Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL?

      I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings.

      Thanks, Luke

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • LoganRay
        LoganRay @McTaggart last edited by

        Glad to help, Luke!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • McTaggart
          McTaggart @LoganRay last edited by

          Thanks Logan for your help with this - much appreciated. Really helpful!

          LoganRay 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • LoganRay
            LoganRay @McTaggart last edited by

            Disallow: /?* is the same thing as Disallow:/?, since the asterisk is a wildcard, both of those disallows prevent any URL that begins with /? from being crawled.

            And yes, it is incredibly easy to disallow the wrong thing! The robots.txt tester in Search Console (under the Crawl menu) is very helpful for figuring out what a disallow will catch and what it will let by. I highly recommend testing any new disallows there before releasing them into the wild.

            McTaggart 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • McTaggart
              McTaggart @LoganRay last edited by

              Thanks again Logan.

              What would Disallow: /?* do because that is what the site I am looking at has implemented. Perhaps it works both ways around?

              I imagine it's easy to disallow the wrong thing or possibly not disallow the right thing. Ugh.

              LoganRay 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • LoganRay
                LoganRay @McTaggart last edited by

                Disallow: /*?

                This disallow literally says to crawlers 'if a URL starts with a slash (all URLs) and has a parameter, don't crawl it'. The * is a wildcard that says anything between / and ? is applicable to the disallow.

                It's very easy to disallow the wrong this especially in regards to parameters, for this reason I always do these 2 things rather than using robots.txt:

                1. Set the purpose of each parameter in Search Console - Go to Crawl > URL Parameters to configure for your site
                2. Self-referring canonicals - most people disallow URLs with parameters in robots.txt to prevent indexing, but this only prevents crawling. A self-referring canonical pointing to the root level of that URL will prevent indexing or URLs with parameters.

                Hope that's helpful!

                McTaggart 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • McTaggart
                  McTaggart @LoganRay last edited by

                  Thanks Logan - I was just reading: Disallow: /*? # block any URL that includes a ? (and thus a query string) - do you know why the ? comes before the * in this case?

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

                    Hi Luke,

                    You are correct that this was done to block URLs with parameters. However, since there's no wildcard (the asterisk) before the folder name, the URL would have to start with /french-wines/. This disallow is really only preventing crawling on the single URL www.yoursite.com/french-wines/ with any parameters appended.

                    McTaggart 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • AspenFasteners

                      What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?

                      We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners
                      1
                    • Tylerj

                      Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?

                      I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj
                      0
                    • Gabriele_Layoutweb

                      If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                      If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb
                      0
                    • EvansHunt

                      Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL

                      Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt
                      0
                    • morg45454

                      Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?

                      my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | morg45454
                      0
                    • fablau

                      Delete or not delete old/unanswered forum threads?

                      Hello everyone, here is another question for you: I have several forum postings on my websites that are pretty old and so they are sort of "dead discussion" threads. Some of those old discussion threads are still getting good views (but not new postings), and so I presume may be valuable for some users. But most of them are just answers to personal questions that I doubt someone else could be interested in. Besides that, many postings are just single, unanswered questions still waiting for an answer, forgotten, they are just sitting there, and will probably stay unanswered for years.... I don't think this may be good for SEO, am I right? How do you suggest to approach this kind of issues on forums or discussions sections on a website? I am eager to know your thoughts on all this. Thank you in advance! All the best, Fab.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
                      0
                    • Modi

                      Robots Disallow Backslash - Is it right command

                      Bit skeptical, as due to dynamic url and some other linkage issue, google has crawled url with backslash and asterisk character ex - www.xyz.com/\/index.php?option=com_product www.xyz.com/\"/index.php?option=com_product Now %5c is the encoded version of \ - backslash & %22 is encoded version of asterisk Need to know for command :- User-agent: *   Disallow: \As am disallowing all backslash url through this - will it only remove the backslash url which are duplicates or the entire site,

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi
                      0
                    • bjs2010

                      Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow

                      Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
                      "There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
                      "Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.