Will Googlebot automatically attempt to index sitemap.xml if my sitemap.xml file wasn't submitted to Google? For example, will Googlebot attempt to index http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml if by chance the file is there?
Google's resource say to submit, but what Googlebot does is a separate question.
http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100283
Sitemap file can have any name and path. So, I don't think that google will look for it, if it is not explicitly specified in robots.txt.
User-agent: *
Sitemap: sitemap.xml
Related
I want to disallow all bots to crawl and index a site. Except Googlebot. I want to allow google to index the index (/) URL, but nothing else. Preferably in robots.txt.
Do you have any ideas on how to achieve this? Thanks!
You'll need to use a robot.txt.
Just create one in your public folder of the website and add;
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will allow google crawler to index all pages and disallow all other crawlers for the whole website.
For details refer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062596?hl=en
I know this could be considered off topic, but still thought I'd answer if this helps.
As John Conde suggested, try webmasters....
I am currently writing my robots.txt file and have some trouble deciding whether I should allow or disallow some folders for SEO purposes.
Here are the folders I have:
/css/ (css)
/js/ (javascript)
/img/ (images i use for the website)
/php/ (PHP which will return a blank page such as for example checkemail.php which checks an email address or register.php which puts data into a SQL database and sends an email)
/error/ (my error 401,403,404,406,500 html pages)
/include/ (header.html and footer.html I include)
I was thinking about disallowing only the PHP pages and let the rest.
What do you think?
Thanks a lot
Laurent
/css and /js -- CSS and Javascript files will probably be crawled by googlebot whether or not you have them in robots.txt. Google uses them to render your pages for site preview. Google has asked nicely that you not put them in robots.txt.
/img -- Googlebot may crawl this even when in robots.txt the same way as CSS and Javascript. Putting your images in robots.txt generally prevents them from being indexed in Google image search. Google image search may be a source of visitors to your site so you may wish to be indexed there.
/php -- sounds like you don't want spiders hitting the urls that perform actions. Good call to use robots.txt
/error -- If your site is set up correctly the spiders will probably never know what directory your error pages are served from. They generally get served at the url that has the error and the spider never sees their actual url. This isn't the case if you redirect to them, which isn't recommended practice anyway. As such, I would say there is no need to put them in robots.txt
I am wondering if there is a way to include in my robots.txt a line which stops Google from indexing any URL in my website, that contains specific text.
I have different sections, all of which contain different pages. I don't want Google to index page2, page3, etc, just the main page.
The URL structure I have is as follows:
http://www.domain.com/section
http://www.domain.com/section/page/2
http://www.domain.com/section/article_name
Is there any way to put in my robots.txt file a way to NOT index any URL containing:
/page/
Thanks in advance everyone!
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: http://www.domain.com/section/*
or depending on your requirement:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: http://www.domain.com/section/page/*
Also you may use the Google Webmaster tools rather than the robots.txt file
Goto GWT / Crawl / URL Parameters
Add Parameter: page
Set to: No URLs
You can directly use
Disallow: /page
How do I tell crawlers / bots not to index any URL that has /node/ pattern?
Following is since day one but I noticed that Google has still indexed a lot of URLs that has
/node/ in it, e.g. www.mywebsite.com/node/123/32
Disallow: /node/
Is there anything that states that do not index any URL that has /node/
Should I write something like following:
Disallow: /node/*
Update:
The real problem is despite:
Disallow: /node/
in robots.txt, Google has indexed pages under this URL e.g. www.mywebsite.com/node/123/32
/node/ is not a physical directory, this is how drupal 6 shows it's content, I guess this is my problem that node is not a directory, merely part of URLs being generated by drupal for the content, how do I handle this? will this work?
Disallow: /*node
Thanks
Disallow: /node/ will disallow any url that starts with /node/ (after the host). The asterisk is not required.
So it will block www.mysite.com/node/bar.html, but will not block www.mysite.com/foo/node/bar.html.
If you want to block anything that contains /node/, you have to write Disallow: */node/
Note also that Googlebot can cache robots.txt for up to 7 days. So if you make a change to your robots.txt today, it might be a week before Googlebot updates its copy of your robots.txt. During that time, it will be using its cached copy.
Disallow: /node/* is exactly what you want to do. Search engines support wildcards in their robots.txt notation and the * characters means "any characters". See Google's notes on robots.txt for more.
update
An alternative way to make sure search engines stay out of a directory, and all directories below it, is to block them with the robots HTTP header. This can be done by placing the following in an htaccess file in your node directory:
Header set x-robots-tag: noindex
Your original Disallow was fine. Jim Mischel's comment seemed spot on and would cause me to wonder if it was just taking time for Googlebot to fetch the updated robots.txt and then unindex relevant pages.
A couple additional thoughts:
Your page URLs may appear in Google search results even if you've included it in robots.txt. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 ("...While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web."). To many people, this is counter-intuitive.
Second, I'd highly recommend verifying ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en), then using tools such as Health->"Fetch as Google" to see real time diagnostics related to retrieving your page. (Does that result indicate that robots.txt is preventing crawling?)
I haven't used it, but Bing has a similar tool: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/fetch-as-bingbot-fe18fa0d . It seems well worthwhile to use diagnostic tools provided by Google, Bing, etc. to perform real-time diagnostics on the site.
This question is a bit old, so I hope you've solved the original problem.
I did:
<meta name="robots" content="none"/>
Is that the best way to go about it, or is there a better way?
You can create a file called robots.txt in the root of your site. The format is this:
User-agent: (user agent string to match)
Disallow: (URL here)
Disallow: (other URL here)
...
Example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Will make (the nice) robots not index anything on your site. Of course, some robots will completely ignore robots.txt, but for the ones that honor it, it's your best bet.
If you'd like more information on the robots.txt file, please see http://www.robotstxt.org/
You could use a robots.txt file to direct search engines which pages not to index.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449
Or use the meta noindex tag in each page.