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?
-
Awesome! That did the trick -- thanks for your help. The site is no longer listed
-
Fact is, the robots file alone will never work (the link has a good explanation why - short form: all it does is stop the bots from indexing again).
Best to request removal then wait a few days.
-
Yeah. As of yet, the site has not been de-indexed. We placed the conditional rule in htaccess and are getting different robots.txt files for the domain and subdomain -- so that works. But I've never done this before so I don't know how long it's supposed to take?
I'll try to verify via Webmaster Tools to speed up the process. Thanks
-
You should do a remove request in Google Webmaster Tools. You have to first verify the sub-domain then request the removal.
See this post on why the robots file alone won't work...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
-
Awesome. We used your second idea and so far it looks like it is working exactly how we want. Thanks for the idea.
Will report back to confirm that the subdomain has been de-indexed.
-
Option 1 could come with a small performance hit if you have a lot of txt files being used on the server.
There shouldn't be any negative side effects to option 2 if the rewrite is clean (IE not accidently a redirect) and the content of the two files are robots compliant.
Good luck
-
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely have to do a bit more research into this one to make sure that it doesn't have any negative side effects before implementation
-
We have a plugin right now that places canonical tags, but unfortunately, the canonical for the subdomain points to the subdomain. I'll look around to see if I can tweak the settings
-
Sounds like (from other discussions) you may be stuck requiring a dynamic robot.txt file which detects what domain the bot is on and changes the content accordingly. This means the server has to run all .txt file as (I presume) PHP.
Or, you could conditionally rewrite the /robot.txt URL to a new file according to sub-domain
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.website.com$
RewriteRule ^robotx.txt$ robots-subdomain.txtThen add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /to the robots-subdomain.txt file
(untested)
-
Placing canonical tags isn't an option? Detect that the page is being viewed through the subdomain, and if so, write the canonical tag on the page back to the root domain?
Or, just place a canonical tag on every page pointing back to the root domain (so the subdomain and root domain pages would both have them). Apparently, it's ok to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself. I haven't tried this, but if Matt Cutts says it's ok...
-
Hey Ryan,
I wasn't directly involved with the decision to create the subdomain, but I'm told that it is necessary to create in order to bypass certain elements that were affecting the root domain.
Nevertheless, it is a blog and the users now need to login to the subdomain in order to access the Wordpress backend to bypass those elements. Traffic for the site still goes to the root domain.
-
They both point to the same location on the server? So there's not a different folder for the subdomain?
If that's the case then I suggest adding a rule to your htaccess file to 301 the subdomain back to the main domain in exactly the same way people redirect from non-www to www or vice-versa. However, you should ask why the server is configured to have a duplicate subdomain? You might just edit your apache settings to get rid of that subdomain (usually done through a cpanel interface).
Here is what your htaccess might look like:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect non-www to wwww
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> -
Not to me LOL I think you'll need someone with a bit more expertise in this area than I to assist in this case. Kyle, I'm sorry I couldn't offer more assistance... but I don't want to tell you something if I'm not 100% sure. I suspect one of the many bright SEOmozer's will quickly come to the rescue on this one.
Andy
-
Hey Andy,
Herein lies the problem. Since the domain and subdomain point to the exact same place, they both utilize the same robots.txt file.
Does that make sense?
-
Hi Kyle Yes, you can block an entire subdomain via robots.txt, however you'll need to create a robots.txt file and place it in the root of the subdomain, then add the code to direct the bots to stay away from the entire subdomain's content.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /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
-
Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!
Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site (into the main site ( different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
Directory where the site was moved (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
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 | | McTaggart0 -
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
Hello, I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links. I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000! Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000. This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Blocking some countries and redirecting that traffic
Hi there, I have a video site, which is on CDN and is really expensive to run. So I want to block most of the countries and only keep HQ ones. I wonder if there's a difference if I just block them and show blank page, or if I show them a page with text and let's say a link to a different site or if I just simply redirect to some other site. Do you think I can still get good ranking on google on countries that I don't block?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
Rel canonical and duplicate subdomains
Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770