Robots.txt to block a parameter instead of a directory

Question

It's my understanding that URLs are of the format example.com/something/somethingelse.

It's my understanding that parameters follow the URL with a question mark example.com?l=fr_FR

My CMS website has language translations that use parameters. The example above is for the French language version of my site.

I would like to block all non english translations from Google Index using robots.txt.

In the blocked URLs tool in GWT I tried to test this:

# robots.txt generated at http://www.mcanerin.com
User-agent: *
Disallow: 
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: ?l=

Against the following URL, which appeared as one of the duplicate page titles in HTML improvements.

https://example.com/reports/view/884?l=eu

This is my first time fiddling with this tool in GWT so I'm not sure if I'm using it right.

The test results for Googlebot says

Allowed by line 3: Disallow:

I wanted the code to prevent Google indexing any URLs that contain the following string

?l=

Here are some examples of URLs I'd like to block from the index. These URLs generate duplicate titles according to GWT. /reports/view/884?l=km /reports/view/884?l=ne_NP /reports/view/884?l=te /index.php/page/index/12?l=fr_FR&l=hy_AM /index.php/page/index/12?l=ht_HT&l=bn_BD /index.php/page/index/12?l=hu_HU&l=hy_AM

Can I tell the robots to exclude URLs with tags that contain

?l=

Answer 1

You can block URLs that contain ?l= from being indexed by search engine robots by using the following robots.txt directive:

Disallow: /*?l=

The / indicates the root directory, and * is a wildcard for anything up to ?l=, followed by anything after it.