I have two robots.txt pages for www and non-www version. Will that be a problem?
-
There are two robots.txt pages. One for www version and another for non-www version though I have moved to the non-www version.
-
It wont affect your SEO, you just don;t need the the non-https version
-
Hi ramb,
Short answer: No, it won't affect your ability to rank in Google. Unless both sites (non-www and www version) compete for the same search term and one of them isn't blocked in the correspondent robots.txt file.
If you can, make sure to have a redirection rule so as everything in the non-www goes to the www.
It bugs me why aren't you redirecting the complete non-www to the www version.
Two possibilities come to my mind:- You can't redirect the whole non-www due to some app or technical need.
In this case, both versions, if accessible to Google, will be treated as different sites. Thus, you must be sure that both robots file are correct for the given subdomain. - You have a separate website, which contains different content from the www version (this usually happens with subdomains with different page types, such as products.abc.com and categories.abc.com)
In this case, please be sure that you know what you want to be blocked and have each robots.txt file in their subdomain.
Keep in mind that Robots file only controls where you don't want googlebot to access in the public version of your website. When a certain page or group of pages are blocked in robots.txt, google won't access them anymore thus not knowing if that page has what it needs to rank for any given search term. Google might rank lower and users will see a note in search results, leading to a lower CTR.
Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
Gaston - You can't redirect the whole non-www due to some app or technical need.
-
Are you redirecting everything on www to non-www? If so, you don't really need a robots.txt to be served for the www subdomain. Google will ignore the original robots.txt file if it is given a 301 anyway.
-
Hi Gatson
Thank you for your response. Currently, www version of the site is redirected to non-www version, which is the primary(or root) domain.
But the problem is, I have 2 robots.txt files running for the same site. i.e. same robots.txt file loads on both www and non-www version. (Example https://www.abc.com/robots.txt and https://abc.com/robots.txt).
Does it affect my site's SEO ??
Should I redirect www-version of the file to non-www version?
Your feedback will be highly appreciated.Thank you,
R.
-
Hi ramb,
It's totally fine to have different robots.txt files for different subdomains.
Thus said, http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are different subdomains. Consider the one with non-www as the full root domain.In case it is needed, here you have Google's official resource about robots.txt:
Learn about Robots.txt file - Search Console helpHope it helps.
Best luck.
Gast
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
-
Website URL, Robots.txt and Google Search Console (www. vs non www.)
Hi MOZ Community,
Technical SEO | | Badiuzz
I would like to request your kind assistance on domain URLs - www. VS non www. Recently, my team have moved to a new website where a 301 Redirection has been done. Original URL : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) New URL : https://example.com.my/ (without www.) Our current robots.txt sitemap : https://www.example.com.my/sitemap.xml (with www.)
Our Google Search Console property : https://www.example.com.my/ (with www.) Question:
1. How/Should I standardize these so that Google crawler can effectively crawl my website?
2. Do I have to change back my website URLs to (with www.) or I just need to update my robots.txt?
3. How can I update my Google Search Console property to reflect accordingly (without www.), because I cannot see the options in the dashboard.
4. Is there any to dos such as Canonicalization needed, or should I wait for Google to automatically detect and change it, especially in GSC property? Really appreciate your kind assistance. Thank you,
Badiuzz0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Will a robots.txt disallow apply to a 301ed URL?
Hi there, I have a robots.txt query which I haven't tried before and as we're nearing a big time for sales, I'm hesitant to just roll out to live! Say for example, in my robots.txt I disallow the URL 'example1.html'. In reality, 'example1.html' 301s/302s to 'example2.html'. Would the robots.txt directive also apply to 'example2.html' (disallow) or as it's a separate URL, would the directive be ignored as it's not valid? I have a feeling that as it's a separate URL, the robots disallow directive won't apply. However, just thought I'd sense-check with the community.
Technical SEO | | ecommercebc0 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Confirming Robots.txt code deep Directories
Just want to make sure I understand exactly what I am doing If I place this in my Robots.txt Disallow: /root/this/that By doing this I want to make sure that I am ONLY blocking the directory /that/ and anything in front of that. I want to make sure that /root/this/ still stays in the index, its just the that directory I want gone. Am I correct in understanding this?
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Robots.txt
Hi everyone, I just want to check something. If you have this entered into your robots.txt file: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | PeterM22
Disallow: /fred/ This wouldn't block /fred-review/ from being crawled would it? Thanks0 -
Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month. Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%). My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not. So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)? Hope my question is clear 🙂 P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue 🙂
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0