Robots.txt anomaly
-
Hi,
I'm monitoring a site thats had a new design relaunch and new robots.txt added.
Over the period of a week (since launch) webmaster tools has shown a steadily increasing number of blocked urls (now at 14).
In the robots.txt file though theres only 12 lines with the disallow command, could this be occurring because a line in the command could refer to more than one page/url ? They all look like single urls for example:
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themesetc, etc
And is it normal for webmaster tools reporting of robots.txt blocked urls to steadily increase in number over time, as opposed to being identified straight away ?
Thanks in advance for any help/advice/clarity why this may be happening ?
Cheers
Dan
-
many thanks for that Dan !
-
As far as I thought, the important thing is that your feed shows up in feed readers. Can you subscribe to and view your RSS feed in a variety of different feed readers?
Yes, so long as the ? is utilized only in ways in which would result in duplicate content, or content that would not be desirable to crawl, it will have that effect.
-Dan
-
Many Thanks for your comments Dan !
So it doesnt matter that the feeds not going to be crawled, dont we want feeds to be crawled usually?
Blocking anything with a ? is surely good then isnt it since prevents all the dupe content etc one gets from search results ?
Yes my clients webmaster set it up
-
Hi Dan
I see no reason to disallow the feed like that by default, unless there is some reason I don't know about. But it won't harm anything either.
The second part blocks any URL which begins with a ? (question mark). This would block anything that has a parameter in the URL - most commonly a search word, pagination, filtering settings etc.
As far as I'm aware this is not going to be damaging to the site, but it's not the default setting. Did someone set it up that way for you?
My robots.txt shows the default WordPress settings: http://www.evolvingseo.com/robots.txt
-
Hi Dan
Yes please find below, please can you also confirm if the bottom 2 lines refer to blocking internal search results ?:
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: */feedDisallow: /?
Disallow: /*?Many Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan
Can you share the exact line disallowing RSS?
Thanks!
-Dan
-
sorry 1 more question, i see that the webmaster has disallowed the feeds in the robots.txt file is this normal/desirable, i would have thought one would want rss feeds crawled by Google ?
-
nice 1 cheers Jesse !
-
Your assumption is correct. The disallows you listed are directories, not pages. Therefore, anything within the Plugins folder will be disallowed, same with the cache and themes folder.
So you may have multiple files (and I'm sure you do) within each of those folders.
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
-
Clarification regarding robots.txt protocol
Hi,
Technical SEO | | nlogix
I have a website , and having 1000 above url and all the url already got indexed in Google . Now am going to stop all the available services in my website and removed all the landing pages from website. Now only home page available . So i need to remove all the indexed urls from Google . I have already used robots txt protocol for removing url. i guess it is not a good method for adding bulk amount of urls (nearly 1000) in robots.txt . So just wanted to know is there any other method for removing indexed urls.
Please advice.0 -
Disallow statement - is this tiny anomaly enough to render Disallow invalid?
Google site search (site:'hbn.hoovers.com') indicates 171,000 results for this subdomain. That is not a desired result - this site has 100% duplicate content. We don't want SEs spending any time here. Robots.txt is set up mostly right to disallow all search engines from indexing this site. That asterisk at the end of the disallow statement looks pretty harmless - but could that be why the site has been indexed? User-agent: * Disallow: /*
Technical SEO | | lzhao0 -
Google indexing despite robots.txt block
Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Robots.txt - What is the correct syntax?
Hello everyone I have the following link: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I want to prevent google from indiexing everything that is related to "view=send_friend" The problem is that its giving me dublicate content, and the content of the links has no SEO value of any sort. My problem is how i disallow it correctly via robots.txt I tried this syntax: Disallow: /view=send_friend/ However after doing a crawl on request the 200+ dublicate links that contains view=send_friend is still present in the CSV crawl report. What is the correct syntax if i want to prevent google from indexing everything that is related to this kind of link?
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
Removal request for entire catalog. Can be done without blocking in robots?
Bunch of thin content (catalog) pages modified with "follow, noindex" few weeks ago. Site completely re-crawled and related cache shows that these pages were not indexed again. So it's good I suppose 🙂 But all of them are still in main Google index and shows up from time to time in SERPs. Will they eventually disappear or we need to submit removal request?Problem is we really don't want to add this pages into robots.txt (they are passing link juice down below to product pages)Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Mobile site: robots.txt best practices
If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Is it terrible to not have robots.txt ?
I was under the impression that you really should have a robots.txt page, and not having one is pretty bad. However, hubspot (which I'm not impressed with) does not have the capability of properly implementing one. Will this hurt the site?
Technical SEO | | StandUpCubicles1 -
Is robots.txt a must-have for 150 page well-structured site?
By looking in my logs I see dozens of 404 errors each day from different bots trying to load robots.txt. I have a small site (150 pages) with clean navigation that allows the bots to index the whole site (which they are doing). There are no secret areas I don't want the bots to find (the secret areas are behind a Login so the bots won't see them). I have used rel=nofollow for internal links that point to my Login page. Is there any reason to include a generic robots.txt file that contains "user-agent: *"? I have a minor reason: to stop getting 404 errors and clean up my error logs so I can find other issues that may exist. But I'm wondering if not having a robots.txt file is the same as some default blank file (or 1-line file giving all bots all access)?
Technical SEO | | scanlin0