Robots.txt - Googlebot - Allow... what's it for?
-
Hello - I just came across this in robots.txt for the first time, and was wondering why it is used? Why would you have to proactively tell Googlebot to crawl JS/CSS and why would you want it to? Any help would be much appreciated - thanks, Luke
User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /.js
Allow: /.css
-
Thanks Tom - that's very useful - appreciated - and thanks also Clever PhD re: the robots.txt tester info - Luke
-
Just as a follow-up to Tom's great post. If you were wanting to test a robots.txt setup, especially if you were using a wildcard or using an allow combined with a disallow, Google Search Console under the Crawl section has a robots.txt Tester. You will see your most recent robots.txt file there that Google has a copy of. You can then modify that version and then enter a URL at the bottom to see if everything is set correctly or not. It is pretty handy, especially if you have a big robots.txt file. Note that this tool does not change how Google crawls your site or your robots.txt file, it is just for testing. Once you find the configuration that works, you would still need to update the robots.txt on your server.
-
Hi Luke
As you have correctly assumed, that particular robots command would be pointless.
The Googlebot does follow allow commands (while other ones do not), but it should only be used if it is an exception to a disallow rule.
So, for example, if you had a rule that blocked pages within a sub-directory, with:
Disallow: /example/*
You could create an allow rule that indexes a specific page within that directory to be indexed, like:
Allow: /example/page.html
Couple of things to point out here. "At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule." (Google Source). In this example, because the more specific rule is the allow rule, that will prevail. It is also best practice to put your "allow" rules at the top of the robots.txt file.
But in your example, if they have allow rules for JS and CSS files without having disavow rules for those directories/paths etc - it's a waste of space. Google will attempt to crawl anything it can by default - unless you disavow access.
TL;DR - You don't need to proactively tell Google to crawl CSS and JS - it will by default.
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
-
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
Can a move to a new domain (with 301's) shake off a google algorithm penalty
we have done everything under the sun using the holy grail of google guidelines to get our site back onto page 1 for our domain. we have recovered (penguin and panda) algorithm filters for keywords that were page 1 going to page 7 and now page 2. its been 2 years and we cant hit page 1 again. this is our final phase we cna think of.. do you thin kit will work if we move to a new domain. and how much traffic/rankings can we expect to lose in the short-term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
SSL and robots.txt question - confused by Google guidelines
I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Pinging SE's - is this spam?
Hi, Just read on ViperChill that Matt Cutts told Glen (owner of ViperChill) that ping services can help your blog posts. Now lets say you have a list of 10 that you ping and you put an article up everyday, thats 300 pings a month, is that not spammy? Here is the link to the post: http://www.viperchill.com/future-of-blogging/ If you scroll down your see a screen print of Google search box, its the para above and below this screen print.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper1 -
What's the best .NET blog solution?
I asked our developers to implement a WordPress blog on our site and they feel that the technology stack that is required to support WP will interfere with a number of different .NET production applications on that server. I can't justify another server just because of a blog either. They want me to find a .NET blog solution. The only thing that looks decent out there is dotnetblogengine.net. Has anyone had any experience with this tool or any others like it? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles1 -
Could the top SEO's such as Rand enter any arena?
This is just a post for fun really. Do you think the top 3 SEO's in the world could be in the top 3 results of any industry in 6 months? I would love to see this in action really, a couple of guys against industry giants in insurance or something.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0