Robots.txt is text file used by Website owners to give instructions about their site to web robots. Basically it tells robots which parts of the site are open and which parts are closed. This is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

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Stop bots from crawling old links with extensions

I've recently switched to MVC3 which is extension-less for the URL's, but Google and Bing have a wealth of links that they are crawling which no longer exist. So I'm trying to find out if there is a ...
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392 views

Why am I getting this message “Some important page is blocked by robots.txt”?

My site's URL is: www.hackinguniverse.org From some day in Google Webmaster tool a message is showing that says "Some important page is blocked by robots.txt". My robots.txt is: User-agent: ...
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869 views

Why google isn't updating my site title in search results? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Google doesn't seem to update the description or title of my homepage I had my domain for few days before I uploaded site to it, and it had one title, and then when ...
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2answers
241 views

Dynamic URLs are Restricted by Robots.txt; does it really matter for SEO?

Today, I was searching for Robots.txt on Google and I found this such a great thread regarding it. I checked Google webmaster tools and found that, there are 117 URLs are restricted by Robots.txt. ...
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181 views

Is “robots.txt” necessarily needed? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Do I need robots.txt? From my understanding robots.txt is only needed to do something different from the norm like exclude a certain file directory and such, but if this ...
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238 views

How do I have Google not index any of my site, except my domain?

Disallow: / I want Google to index the index page, but nothing else. Will this achieve it?
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2answers
192 views

How can I allow search engines to index my invite only website in ruby on rails?

I have a ruby on rails website that will be in invite-only mode for the next couple of months. Currently I have it set up so visits to any page performs an authentication: before_filter ...
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3answers
112 views

Robots are still disallowed even without a robots.txt file

I'm having trouble with a website I'm working on. I initially set up a robots.txt file to prevent robots from indexing it while I was working on it. However now its live and the robots.txt rile has ...
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3answers
116 views

Do crawlers require a robots.txt file before indexing content?

Do you need a robots.txt file for the crawlers to index your site, or it is just to disallow any content that you don't want crawlers to index?
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533 views

Restricting crawler activity to certain directories with robots.txt

I would like to use robots.txt to prevent indexing of some parts of my website. I want search engines to index only the / directory and not search inside my controllers. In my robots.txt, I have ...
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2answers
364 views

Image Hot-links & Google's Instant Previews

I'm trying to adjust my site: 1. stop Image Hot-links 2. block Googlebot-Image (because I do not want my images to be searchable) 3. allow Google's Instant Previews I've tried this but the Instant ...
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147 views

Stop searches showing tld domain sites appearing as subdirectory of main holding site domain?

I'm not sure if this is a problem specific to how my hosting is structured or not. Let's say the main domain for my account is maindomain.com (for purpose of discussion) I am building other sites, ...
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1k views

How to control what appears on google search results?

So I have just built a site and all is well... but I want to control what appears on google search results. Lets say I google for "thefwa", first what comes is the link to www.thefwa.com, then ...
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Does Yahoo Slurp crawl hammer a site?

A lot of robots.txt examples seem to feature Crawl-Delay for Yahoo Slurp for up to 2 hours, is this because Yahoo Slurp tends to hammer a website and increase server load?
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1k views

Google Webmasters Tools: Denied by robots.txt

I have a website: http://46.105.30.3/ And I'm trying to get testing it using the Fetch as Googlebot option in the Google Webmasters Tools. When I try it it returns Denied by robots.txt. My ...
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351 views

Will google remove the old caches if noarchive is added to robots.txt

If you want google's cache of your site to remain unchanged is it a good idea to add noarchive to robots.txt? Or will this wipe out your caches?
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274 views

robots.txt ignored

I'm working on a joomla website, and robots.txt is messing with me... i have it in domain.com/website/robots.txt and I just wanna prevent users from browsing directories. By default it had Disallow: ...
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153 views

Robots.txt Issue

So I've been assigned to take a look at our SEO (an area I have some, but not amazing competence in), and the first thing I noticed is that our robots.txt file says the following: # go away ...
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254 views

Robots.txt not working because my site is still searchable

I put a robots.txt in my server This is the code that I putted in User-agent: * Disallow: / I just want my entire site won't be searchable in google. I also put in the NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW on the ...
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62 views

Serious Googlebot spike

One of the sites I maintain has seen googlebot use 23gb of bandwidth this month. This seems utterly mental to me, what can I do about it? I have reduced the crawl rate on webmaster tools, and ...
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2answers
415 views

Should a mobile-only site use robots.txt?

I have a mobile site that is distinct from the corresponding desktop site. The sites share the same content, but the mobile site files are in a completely different directory. The main site had a ...
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6answers
77 views

Uploading a non-finished website

I have a pretty basic question. I developed a neet little website wich I'm ready to upload, but still needs a bit of work. The designer needs the html to do his work so the website needs to be ...
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2answers
2k views

robots.txt for a CodeIgniter based website?

I am working on a php site that uses Code Igniter framework and has the following folder structure on the server. public_html application public sql style system design images ...
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129 views

Robots.txt syntax -> Can this be done?

When creating a robots.txt, are the following the same? # Slurp User-agent: Slurp Disallow: / and # Slurp User-agent: Slurp Disallow: / It seems like for someone disallowing a large number of ...
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5answers
107 views

removing robots.txt

Will removing robots.txt make the website 'searchable' again. Curious if you had a robots.txt to avoid indexing, but changed your mind and wanted to get indexed.
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2answers
120 views

Pointing to Google that a specific website is for mobiles

I have 2 websites: let's call them A and B. A is a Desktop optimized website. B is a mobile version of A, but it's not on the same domain. It also has a smaller amount of content/pages than A How ...
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106 views

Will robots.txt block crawling things like menu and footer links?

If I am blocking a page called pay.php, google won't crawl this page. But what about the links that are on this page as default as menu and footer links? Will these links also be blocked from ...
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522 views

“Restricted by Robots.txt” in Google Webmaster Tools when no robots.txt exists

In Google Webmaster Tools, I have 832 errors in the sitemap with the error being "URL restricted by robots.txt". I don't have a robots.txt file, and the robots meta tag equals "index, follow". I did ...
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1answer
130 views

Do I need robots.txt?

I want to allow all bots to crawl everything, do I need to create a robots.txt? If the file is missing will it have a negative influence on some crawlers? If I need to create it, what should it look ...
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2answers
107 views

Robots.txt and specific file inclusion

Is it possible to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of a folder, but allow crawling a specific file in that folder?
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4k views

Googlebot crawler: URL restricted by robots.txt - how to fix the entries in robots.txt?

I noticed recently that Google is not caching all of the pages on my website. Upon using the Google webmaster diagnostic tool, I realized that some of my pages were being restricted by entries in my ...
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1answer
93 views

Adsense and blocking robots from web pages

If I use a meta tag to make a page 'noindex' does this mean that my adsense ads will not be targeted?
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117 views

Problem with my robots.txt

I want to allow a certain html file and my site's index file to be indexed by search engines. Everything else should be disallowed. My home directory does not actually contain an index file, I am ...
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105 views

Where should the robots.txt file be?

If I have a subdomain: subdir.a.com that redirects to a.com/myfolder/ should the robots.txt file be in: subdir.a.com/robots.txt or in a.com/myfolder/robots.txt
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362 views

Can a sitemap index contain other sitemap indexes?

I have a bi-lingual website with a sitemap index for each language that links to several different sitemaps (one for videos, one for static content, and one for articles). I would like to introduce ...
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2answers
132 views

How to temporarely remove a website from search engines?

we are working on a new website and we forgot to disallow robots after putting the test version online, on a subdomain. now we are being already referenced by bots (google, yahoo...) and we dont want ...
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1answer
104 views

To disallow indexing the category and tag listings in a blog

Mark Wilson says that category and tag listings in a blog should be disallowed in order to prevent duplicate content. I understand this. However, I want to put internal links on keywords in the blog ...
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69 views

Search and Tags for robots.txt

After setting up a blog at blogspot.com I added the site to my webmasters tools of google. I noticed an error: "Restricted by robots.txt" and looked a little into the matter. I found in the ...
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318 views

Quick Question, robots.txt Disallow: /*/ does what exactly?

A SEO firm suggested changing the robots.txt to: User-agent: * Disallow: /*/ Allow: /ims/ I'm not sure what that would do, but my guess is that is would tell all robots to index nothing but the ...
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1answer
233 views

How do I disallow an entire directory with robots.txt?

I have two sites I am currently working on which is a shopping cart and another shopper...Both are under the same domain name so for example http://someurl.com/first_url ...
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46 views

Blocking URLs and canonical questions

We are running a Magento store set up and was looking to block all pages with the exception of a select few. It seems the only way we can do this is with blocking direct paths to files that are in ...
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1answer
381 views

wget not respecting my robots.txt. Is there an interceptor?

I have a website where I post csv files as a free service. Recently I have noticed that wget and libwww have been scraping pretty hard and I was wondering how to circumvent that even if only a little. ...
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4answers
93 views

Stopping Google index some web pages I have

I have some web pages that google has indexed. Now I added a robots.txt file to exclude them but should I also add a “noindex” tag and if so then how can I best add this?
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3answers
250 views

After adding *.xls to robots.txt how long will the results continue to show up in google

Is there an estimated amount of time before the document will not appear in google results? We have a public records document. One person raised a concern when they saw their "PUBLIC INFORMATION" on ...
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1answer
1k views

Search engines that do _not_ respect robots.txt?

Are there any search engines that do not care about robots.txt?
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1answer
837 views

How to hide my website from search engines using robots.txt? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Robots denied by domain is still listed in search results I want to hide my website from all search engines for that i write robots.txt in that robots.txt i write code ...
2
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1answer
131 views

How can I let robots access my site?

I have a webpage on my university's server, which means I cannot access the root directory and change files there. Is there some other way to give access to robots to my page? Thanks.
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3answers
543 views

What is a good robots.txt for WP?

What is the "best" setup for robots.txt? I'm using the following permalink structure in Wordpress: /%category%/%postname%/. My robots.txt currently looks like this (copied from somewhere a long time ...
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216 views

robots.txt and disallow

Which one is correct? User-agent: * Disallow: index.php or User-agent: * Disallow: /index.php inorder to block all pages like index.php?day=7 index.php?day=15 index.php?day=30
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137 views

Should a single page fetcher like TinEye obey robots.txt?

I've noticed that tineye.com does not attempt to fetch "robots.txt" from my website. It also sends a "user agent" string consisting of the user's browser with "TinEye/1.0 (via http://www.tineye.com/)" ...