Robots.txt File Redirects to Home Page
-
I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering:
Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this?
Will this effect how their site will get indexed?
Thanks for your response!
- Kyle
Site URL:
-
Yep, if you add a robots.txt it won't redirect. But I would look to remove the 404 redirect as well. It also looks to me like a meta refresh as well which has potential SEO problems. I would much prefer a 301 if they are really keen to redirect 404s.
The main reason for not redirecting 404s is that it stops you from seeing broken links on your website. Imagine you have a discreet link to a services page that is broken - you wouldn't be able to pick it up with link checkers like Xenu and it could go unnoticed for months if not years. Might be worth suggesting to them that they remove it.
-
This is not a normal behavior, you should respond to robots.txt, put the sitemap link in there or simply :
User-agent: *
Disallow:The actual robots.txt gives :
GET robots.txt 302 Found, which redirects to :
GET 404error.html 200 Ok, which redirect to the home with browser behavior :
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/">
You better change this to a normal response
-
Thanks for the input! I haven't had a chance to view their .htaccess file. I am still in the early stages of reviewing their site. I just wasn't sure if their would be a technical reason for them to do this or if it just happened by accident. It sounds like adding a basic robots.txt file would be the appropriate solution.
-
1. I wouldnt advise redirecting the robots.txt to redirect to home page. It seems that they hve a dynamic 404 redirect system - which when a URL doesnt exist the site redirects it to home. There are god and bad points about this strategy, hoever I would prefer NOT to do it.
2. Re getting site indexed - no it wouldnt hurt them, but would give you much less control over the robots directive, in case you want to add custom instructions. If Google crawlers cant get to it (as in its not user agent cloaked to allow the google bot) you will not be able to do so (eg excluding pages from being indexed via robots wont be ossible).
-
I would be surprised if they purposefully redirected it. Have you been able to take a look at what's in the .htaccess file? If you copy and paste what's in there I might be able to see what's going on with it.
Also, if it is being redirected then it won't get crawled and so it won't have any effect. That could be good or bad depending on what you had written in the .txt file.
EDIT:
Just had a quick look at the site. It seems to 404 straight away and then redirect. Therefore I imagine the robots.txt file doesn't exist and they have it set up to redirect 404ing pages to the homepage. Something that I would advise against (it's useful to know what's 404ing).
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
-
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
Redirect a page intended for iframe
we built an interactive calculator that gets iframe embedded in our blog and landing pages. the blog that embeds it is doing well the problem is that the iframe source html page is also indexed by google and is on the second page of results. which we don't want as it doesn't have any context/branding/call to action/etc. if i put a noindex meta tag on the iframe html source page, will that remove the indexing of the pages that consume it in an iframe?
Technical SEO | | icstars0 -
How does this rank? - a page that is 301 redirected
How does a 301ed page rank in google? In google I searched for" ikea.ca" which is set up as a 301 redirect to www.ikea.com/ca/en and was surprised to see the url --> www.ikea.ca actually ranking. IKEA Canada <cite>ikea.ca/</cite>IKEA Featuring Scandinavian modern style furniture and accessories. Include storage options, lighting, decor products, kitchen appliances and beds. Bedroom - Kitchen - Living Room - IKEA North York
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
How can I make Google Webmaster Tools see the robots.txt file when I am doing a .htacces redirec?
We are moving a site to a new domain. I have setup an .htaccess file and it is working fine. My problem is that Google Webmaster tools now says it cannot access the robots.txt file on the old site. How can I make it still see the robots.txt file when the .htaccess is doing a full site redirect? .htaccess currently has: Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
Technical SEO | | RalphinAZ
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?michaelswilderhr.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.s2esolutions.com/ [R=301,L] Google webmaster tools is reporting: Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.0 -
How can I exclude display ads from robots.txt?
Google has stated that you can do this to get spiders to content only, and faster. Our IT guy is saying it's impossible.
Technical SEO | | GregBeddor
Do you know how to exlude display ads from robots.txt? Any help would be much appreciated.0 -
301 redirect dropped page rank
Hi, We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4. After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought "should" carry over the page rank. Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya 🙂 My questions Is the 301 the correct method for this? Why did the page rank drop despite the 301? Should we go back to the www domain at this point? Thanks Kris
Technical SEO | | adriot0 -
301 redirect from domain to home.aspx
We have been asked to look at a website and have found a 301 redirect from the domain www.domain.com to www.domain.com/home.aspx. Why would someone do this, this way round? We can't think of a good reason and are wondering if we have overlooked something? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | travelinnovations0