Blocking robots.txt
-
Do you know any methods to block robots.txt file from external users?
-
You can block on server side all IP except Google bot for any file, but it may lead to ban, because of cloaking.
-
There is no setting or feature to do this, but you can do it with code
You could detect the useragnet and create a robot.txt dynamically depending on the useragent.
But i cant see why you would want to do this. -
Hi Zsolt
I don't believe there is a way to, not in a Windows environment anyway.
Robots.txt has to be hosted at website root level, as in example.com/robots.txt which is where search engine bots look for it. If a bot can find it (which they usually need to if one exists) then a person can too.
If there are pages or folders that you don't want anybody to know about, exclude them from robots.txt and edit the Meta Robots tag on each page concerned to e.g. NoIndex, Follow or whatever is appropriate.
Regards
Simon
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
I'm getting an error in Search Console that pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. Unfortunately I can't post images on here but I've linked some url's below. The page below in search console shows the error above... https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/ As does this one. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/independent-school-marketing-communications/ However, this page does not have the error and is indexed by Google. The meta robots tag looks identical. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/blog/leadership-team/jill-goodman/ Any and all help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
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 -
Google Webmaster Tools is saying "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt" after Https move...
Hi Everyone, I really don't see anything wrong with our robots.txt file after our https move that just happened, but Google says all URLs are blocked. The only change I know we need to make is changing the sitemap url to https. Anything you all see wrong with this robots.txt file? robots.txt This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo! and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site, you save bandwidth and server resources. This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host: Used: http://example.com/robots.txt Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html For syntax checking, see: http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html Website Sitemap Sitemap: http://www.bestpricenutrition.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: * Allowable Index Allow: /*?p=
Technical SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /aitmanufacturers/index/view/
Disallow: /blog/tag/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/abuse/reportajax/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/ajaxproduct/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/proscons/checkbyproscons/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: /productquestions/index/ajaxform/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt Paths (no clean URLs) Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
disallow: /?cat=
disallow: /?price=
disallow: /?flavor=
disallow: /?dir=
disallow: /?mode=
disallow: /?list=
disallow: /?limit=5
disallow: /?limit=10
disallow: /?limit=15
disallow: /?limit=20
disallow: /*?limit=250 -
Blocking Test Pages Enmasse on Sub-domain
Hello, We have thousands of test pages on a sub-domain of our site. Unfortunately at some point, these pages were visible to search engines and got indexed. Subsequently, we made a change to the robots.txt file for the test sub-domain. Gradually, over a period of a few weeks, the impressions and clicks as reported by Google Webmaster Tools fell off for the test. sub-domain. We are not able to implement the no index tag in the head section of the pages given the limitations of our CMS. Would blocking off Google bot via the firewall enmasse for all the test pages have any negative consequences for the main domain that houses the real live content for our sites (which we would like to of course remain in the Google index). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Robots exclusion
Hi All, I have an issue whereby print versions of my articles are being flagged up as "duplicate" content / page titles. In order to get around this, I feel that the easiest way is to just add them to my robots.txt document with a disallow. Here is my URL make up: Normal article: www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345 Print version of my article www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345&printversion=yes I know that having dynamic parameters in my URL is not best practise to say the least, but I'm stuck with this for the time being... My question is, how do I add just the print versions of articles to my robots file without disallowing articles too? Can I just add the parameter to the document like so? Disallow: &printversion=yes I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier... Many thanks in advance. Matt
Technical SEO | | Horizon0 -
Quick robots.txt check
We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neooptic0 -
Need Help With Robots.txt on Magento eCommerce Site
Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%. Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website? The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it. I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site. Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.
Technical SEO | | JerDoggMckoy0