How does robots.txt affect aliased domains?
-
Several of my sites are aliased (hosted in subdirectories off the root domain on a single hosting account, but visible at www.theSubDirectorySite.com) Not ideal, I know, but that's a different issue.
I want to block bots from viewing those files that are accessible in subdirectories on the main hosting account, www.RootDomain.com/SubDirectorySite/, and force the bots to look at www.SubDirectorySite.com instead.
I utilized the canonical meta tag to point bots away from the sub directory site, but I am wondering what will happen if I use robots.txt to block those files from within the root domain.
Will the bots, specifically Google bot, still index the site at its own URL, www.AnotherSite.com even if I've blocked that directory with Disallow: /AnotherSite/ ?
THANK YOU!!!
-
I'm assuming you can't 301-redirect (and that you still need the sub-directory versions to be reachable by humans)? I'm not sure the cross-domain canonical will work completely. I don't have a good example of a sub-folder to root domain canonical implementation. If the "sites" are identical, it should be ok.
Robots.txt is going to depend a bit on how people access those. If there are links to the sub-directory versions, then blocking will cut off that link-juice (and the canonical or a 301 will be better).
Blocking the sub-directory shouldn't automatically block the domain it aliases, too, unless for some reason that sub-directory is the only crawl path Google has to the outside domain. As long as they're crawling the outside domain separately, I think you'll be ok. I'm just not sure if Robots.txt is necessary here.
Sorry, the devil may be in the details on this one. Happy to take a closer look in Private Q&A, if you want to give out some specifics.
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
-
Using one robots.txt for two websites
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemap Is this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Robots.txt Disallow: / in Search Console
Two days ago I found out through search console that my website's Robots.txt has changed to User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RAN_SEO
Disallow: / When I check the robots.txt in the website it looks fine - I see its blocked just in search console( in the robots.txt tester). when I try to do fetch as google to the homepage I see its blocked. Any ideas why would robots.txt block my website? it was fine until the weekend. before that, in the last 3 months I saw I had blocked resources in the website and I brought back pages with fetch as google. Any ideas?0 -
Parked Domains
I have a client who has a somewhat odd situation for their domains. They've been really inconsistent with how they've used them over the years, which makes for a slightly sticky situation. The client has two domains: compname.com and fullcompanyname.com. Right now, their website is just HTML (no CMS) and all of the URLs are relative, so both domains work. Since the new website will be in WordPress, they need to commit to one domain as the primary. Right now, it looks like compname.com is the one they've used the most in ads and such, so I'm going to recommend they go with that. However, the client has also used fullcompanyname.com a lot. They don't want to have to setup individual 301 redirects for everything. I think it's ridiculous, but you can lead a horse to water... Our developer has done some research and he may have found a solution that will satisfy the client. I just want to find out if there are any SEO implications. The possible plan is to us compname.com as the primary domain and to park fullcompanyname.com. That way, if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects. Since the domain is parked, Google won't recognize it as duplicate content, correct? Just to be clear on the whole situation, I'm insisting that all of the website URLs need 301 redirects, regardless of the domain. The primary concern is with a lot of other stuff on the server that isn't related to the site (email campaign landing pages, image files, assets that are pulled in by the client's software, etc.). The client's concern is about redirecting all that other stuff (and there is a lot of it--thousands of files). The parked domain would seem to fix that, but I want to make sure that the client won't get Google slapped.
Technical SEO | | BopDesign0 -
"Extremely high number of URLs" warning for robots.txt blocked pages
I have a section of my site that is exclusively for tracking redirects for paid ads. All URLs under this path do a 302 redirect through our ad tracking system: http://www.mysite.com/trackingredirect/blue-widgets?ad_id=1234567 --302--> http://www.mysite.com/blue-widgets This path of the site is blocked by our robots.txt, and none of the pages show up for a site: search. User-agent: * Disallow: /trackingredirect However, I keep receiving messages in Google Webmaster Tools about an "extremely high number of URLs", and the URLs listed are in my redirect directory, which is ostensibly not indexed. If not by robots.txt, how can I keep Googlebot from wasting crawl time on these millions of /trackingredirect/ links?
Technical SEO | | EhrenReilly0 -
Which domain should i set up a blog on?
I have a client who uses a .com for there website in Australia. Were now building an external blog which will be on a subdomain. We recently discovered they also own the Australian version of there domain name. Should we build there blog on: blog.currentdomain.com 2) blog.newdomain.com.au Thanks
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Domain.com and domain.com/ redirect(error)
When I view my campaign report I'm seeing duplicate content/ meta for mydomain.com and mydomain.com/ (with a slash) I already applied a 301 redirect as follows: redirect 301 /index.php/ /index.php Where am I messing up here?
Technical SEO | | cgman0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0