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: /*
-
If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines.
Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps.
Give it a try, you can always disable plugins
Wish you the best!
-
Wordpress is a funny platform, you would think that there isn't much to disallow but there probably is quite a bit. I agree with Federico - you should allow comments, feed, and rss.
I'm not going to make blind assumptions here, so you should check your log files to see what's being constantly crawled, feel free to read this http://moz.com/blog/server-log-essentials-for-seo.
FYI - This is a big job. Shout if you need help.
P.S - Hostgator's Cpanel will allow you to archive raw server logs, make sure you check that option from now on or they'll be overwritten!
-
Thanks for the info!
I contacted Hostgator to fix the robots file because it had been blocking Google's bot for some time now. So that's the robot file they uploaded.
Yes I use wordpress, and apparently some stupid plugin had originally blocked google before hostgator fixed the robots file yesterday.
So to confirm you don't think anything else should be disallowed except for the /wp-admin directory. With the feeds, comments, etc, there isn't any SEO concerns like duplicate content or anything else that may work against me that should be blocked.
Is this safe to assume?
Thanks again!
Eddy
-
Who wrote that robots.txt?
You shouldn't disallow the comments, or feed or almost anything.
I notice you are using wordpress, so if you just want to avoid the admin being indexed (which will isn't going to be as Google does not have access anyway), your robots.txt should look like this:
User-Agent:*
Disallow: /wp-admin/
That's it.
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
-
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt
Hi Everybody, We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring: Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/" Color - For example: ?color=91 Price - For example: "?price=650-700" Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704" Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/" My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled? Any advice would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | centurysafety0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Drip Feeding Free Top 10 Blog Sites for Link Building?
Is it a good move to pick 10 free blogging sites to build links. Like drip feeding them. Let's say 10 blogging sites irrespective of its a sub-domain as we get in wordpress or a sub-folder blog as we get in livejournal. Now adding articles related to my money website on those blogs newly created & building links from them. Then drip feeding them by putting 1 article a month at regular intervals with anchor as links in each of them. Do you think its a good move?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
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 -
Using Meta Header vs Robots.txt
Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Robots.txt disallow subdomain
Hi all, I have a development subdomain, which gets copied to the live domain. Because I don't want this dev domain to get crawled, I'd like to implement a robots.txt for this domain only. The problem is that I don't want this robots.txt to disallow the live domain. Is there a way to create a robots.txt for this development subdomain only? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Partouter0