41
votes
Prevent Google from thinking my own bot is faking traffic on my website
Google has no way of knowing when you hit your own site with your own bot. Google can't see anything that happens on your server.
Even if you use Google Analytics, your bot won't show up in it. ...
- 98.3k
20
votes
Accepted
Are web crawlers able to find a secondary robots.txt in a sub-directory?
No, web crawlers will not read or obey a robots.txt file in a subdirectory. As described on the quasi-official robotstxt.org site:
Where to put it
The short answer: in the top-level directory of ...
- 9,092
15
votes
Prevent Google from thinking my own bot is faking traffic on my website
Google doesn't care about your traffic. Even if you use Google Analytic, Google never uses that data for search engine ranking algorythm.
Gary Illyes from Google says in a tweet
We don't use anything ...
- 1,101
14
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to keep the existence of a domain secret?
Is it possible to keep the existence of a domain secret?
Secret to whom? And incidentally, why does it need to be secret?
Secret to your OS, applications you use (including plugins in your browser, ...
- 8,325
13
votes
How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?
In short: you can't.
Answer depends on the definition of "bots", but if a bot can crawl the e-mail, the bot can hit the link. A bot doesn't necessarily respect robots.txt, or mentioned html ...
- 131
12
votes
Accepted
Can the files robots.txt and sitemap.xml be dynamic through an .htaccess redirect?
You can make any file dynamic. The best way to do so is not through redirects, but through rewrite rules.
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ /robots.php [L]
That way, you power it with a dynamic script, ...
- 98.3k
12
votes
Accepted
Should we drop AJAX crawling scheme?
Several other search engines (Bing, Yandex, etc.) still use the _escaped_fragment_ system. They're not going to stop using it overnight just because Google has. Thus, if you care about your site ...
- 9,092
12
votes
Is it possible to keep the existence of a domain secret?
No not possible. ICANN, the org maintaining DNS provides something that's called Centralized Zone Data Service (CZDS). Which provides lists of all registered domains.
Here is a bunch of info on that: ...
- 229
11
votes
Accepted
Googlebot submitting thousands of requests to our map locater and using up the API quota
To stop googlebot from searching via googlemaps
put a file named robots.txt in the root of your domain.
e.g. https://www.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
Sample robots.txt:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /...
- 226
10
votes
Accepted
How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?
Incorrectly used meta tags
Instead of using two meta tags, you should put both values into a single tag. With two tags, some search engines may choose to obey only one of the two.
<meta name="...
- 98.3k
9
votes
Accepted
Can Googlebot discover URLs that are not in an anchor?
Yes they do crawl everything that looks like a URL. I have made a test (in German, but red="not crawled" and green="crawled"): http://www.sirpauls.com/welchen-links-folgt-google-ein-experiment/
...
- 503
9
votes
Do search engines still crawl a noindex page
Yes, Google still crawl webpages that have noindex tag.
But if you have same content on two different webpages and one URL contain noindex tag, while second does not, then you should not worry about ...
- 5,507
8
votes
Accepted
What determines the frequency the Wayback Machine crawls one's website?
The Wayback Machine archive is a combination of data from a large number of different crawls:
Alexa crawls, which appear after a 6 month delay
Our own crawls, which are seeded from the Alexa top ...
- 248
8
votes
Facebook crawler with no user agent spamming our site in possible DoS attack
Sources say that Facebook/Externalhit does not respect crawl-delay in robots.txt because Facebook doesn't use a crawler, it uses a scraper.
Whenever one of your pages is shared on Facebook, it ...
- 4,788
8
votes
Accepted
Ok to use meta noindex on 404 pages?
There's no problem having a meta noindex tag on the 404 page, to prevent 200 OK responses being indexed.
If this was a PHP page then you could obviously just send a 404 Not Found header as part of the ...
- 42.7k
8
votes
Accepted
How do I "noindex" a text (.txt) file?
The solution is the same as for X-Robots noindex a folder of PDFs and Prevent XML sitemaps from showing up in Google search results. You use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header rather than a meta tag. ...
- 98.3k
8
votes
Accepted
Why does it cause issues to use robots.txt and a meta robots tag at the same time?
The robots.txt standard controls whether the bot can view foo.html under any circumstances. Just because the bot sees a link to it from a different site doesn't give the bot permission to sneak a peek ...
- 15.8k
8
votes
Is it possible to keep the existence of a domain secret?
They do have a list of all domains.
Agencies responsible for many TLDs (top level domain, e.g. .com), publish a zone file, a list of all registered domains in that TLD, along with their DNS servers. ...
8
votes
Does googlebot crawl the variable name of a php
Except in the case of misconfiguration, the PHP code is executed on the server and what gets transmitted to the client is only the result of the execution which may be a mix of static HTML + dynamic ...
- 8,325
7
votes
How to identify if IP address is really google's IP
From the official docs to verify Googlebot / Google:
Note that Google does not recommend using a static "whitelist".
You can verify if a web crawler accessing your server really is ...
- 42.7k
7
votes
Deny access to Archive.is
Okay. This is a new one (to me at least) and quite interesting so far. I will not get into the weeds on this.
When I wrote this, I was working on little or no sleep. I missed a few things which @unor ...
- 32.8k
7
votes
Do I really have to block MJ12Bot (as the prevailing visitor on my site)?
MJ12bot adheres to the robots.txt standard. If you want the bot to prevent website from being crawled then add the following text to your robots.txt:
User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /
- 171
7
votes
Accepted
Do search engines still crawl a noindex page
As Goyllo has already stated, search engine bots will crawl pages that have a noindex meta tag. If you think about it, they need to crawl the page in order to see the noindex meta tag in the first ...
- 42.7k
7
votes
Accepted
Should I publish an empty ads.txt file for a site that does not run any ads?
Ads.txt has zero to do with SEO or even UX. It is specific to programmatic advertising. It might be of interest if your websites display ads that are purchased on real time bidding (RTB) exchanges. ...
- 5,204
7
votes
Should I publish an empty ads.txt file for a site that does not run any ads?
Yes.
According to version 1.0.2 of the ads.txt specification:
3.2.1 FILES WITHOUT AUTHORIZED ADVERTISING SYSTEM RECORDS
Some publishers may choose to not authorize any advertising system by
...
- 171
7
votes
Accepted
Ampersand (&) in actual URL and sitemap
if this difference of ampersand in URL and sitemap will cause any issue.
tl;dr No issue, because the URLs are the same.
Since in sitemap & has to be escaped I replaced & with & ...
...
- 42.7k
7
votes
How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?
Not only can you not ensure it, it's highly likely that the link will be retrieved by programs not under the user's control. Many spam and phishing filters will pre-fetch any web pages linked to in ...
- 236
7
votes
Accepted
Do SEO analysis bots have any advantage in terms of website traffic?
If you aren't using these services, then you can definitely block them. The data collected by these bots are only used within those specific tools and wouldn't affect your performance in organic ...
- 1,471
7
votes
Accepted
Are 'robots.txt' rules "starts with" or "contains" rules (clarification on confusing Google documentation)
the /fish/ rule matches anything in the /fish/ folder (...) it matches the path /animals/fish/
This does look like a mistake in the Google docs IMO (as you suggest) for several reasons:
That example ...
- 42.7k
6
votes
How to properly (dis)allow the archive.org bot? Did things change, if so when?
There are really 2 issues here:
Will the robots.txt on your site Disallow (block) Wayback from crawling your site.
Will Wayback crawl your site.
For point #1:
As others have said, the correct entry ...
- 171
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible