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
      • SEO Q&A
      • 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. SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow

    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.

    SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    1731
    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.
    • jamiegriz
      jamiegriz last edited by

      I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue:

      It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs?

      I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ?

      Thank you!!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • mememax
        mememax @jamiegriz last edited by

        mmm it depends.

        it's really hard for me to answer without knowing your site but I would say that you're in the good direction. You want to provide google more ways to reach your quality content.

        Now do you have any other page that is bringing bots there via a normal user navigation or is it all search driven?

        While google can crawl pages that discovered via internal/external links it can't reproduce searches by typing in your nav bar, so I doubt those pages should be extremely valuable unless you link to them somehow. In that case you may want to keep google crawling them.

        A different thing would be if you want to "index" them, as being searches they are probably aggregating different information already present on the site. For indexation purposes you may want to keep them out of the index while still allowing the bot to run through them.

        Again beware of the crawl budget, you don't want google to be wandering around millions of search results instead of your money pages, unless you're able to let them crawl only a sub portion of that.

        I hope this made sense 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • jamiegriz
          jamiegriz @mememax last edited by

          Thank you for your response! I'm going to do a bit more research but I think I will disallow "account", but unblock "search". The search feature on my site pulls up quality content, so seems like I would want that to be crawled. Does this sound logical to you? 🙂

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

            That could be completely normal. Google sends a warning because you're giving conflicting directions as you are preventing them to crawl pages (via robots) you asked them to index (via sitemap).

            They do not know how important those pages may be for you so you are the one that needs to assess what to do net.

            Are those pages important for you? Do you want them to be in the index? if that's the case change your robots.txt rule, if not then remove them from the sitemap.

            About the previous answer robots text is not used to block hackers but quite the opposite. Hackers can easily find via the robots txt which are the pages you'd like to block and visit them as they may be key pages (ex. wp-admin), but let's not focus on that as hackers have so many ways to find core pages that it's not the topic. Robots txt is normally used to avoid duplication issues and to prevent google from crawling low value pages and waste crawl budget.

            jamiegriz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • TheKatzMeow
              TheKatzMeow Subscriber last edited by

              Typically, you only want robots.txt to block access points that would allow hackers into your site like an admin page (e.g. www.examplesite.com/admin/). You definitely don't want it blocking your whole site. A developer or webmaster would be better at speaking to the specifics, but that's the quick, high-level answer.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 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

              • kayl87

                Is single H1 tag still best practice?

                Hi Guys, Is having a single h1 tag still best practice for SEO? Guessing multiple h1 tags dilute the value of the tag and keywords within the tag. Thoughts? Cheers.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl87
                0
              • McTaggart

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

                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

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                0
              • khi5

                "noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages

                Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
                0
              • workathomecareers

                Should comments and feeds be disallowed in robots.txt?

                Hi My robots file is currently set up as listed below. From an SEO point of view is it good to disallow feeds, rss and comments? I feel allowing comments would be a good thing because it's new content that may rank in the search engines as the comments left on my blog often refer to questions or companies folks are searching for more information on. And the comments are added regularly. What's your take? I'm also concerned about the /page being blocked. Not sure how that benefits my blog from an SEO point of view as well. Look forward to your feedback. Thanks. Eddy User-agent: Googlebot Crawl-delay: 10 Allow: /* User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 10 Disallow: /wp- Disallow: /feed/ Disallow: /trackback/ Disallow: /rss/ Disallow: /comments/feed/ Disallow: /page/ Disallow: /date/ Disallow: /comments/ # Allow Everything Allow: /*

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | workathomecareers
                0
              • nicole.healthline

                Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?

                We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                4
              • digisavvy

                There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?

                Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy
                0
              • kylesuss

                Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

                Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss
                12
              • nicole.healthline

                Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?

                When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                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.