SSL and robots.txt question - confused by Google guidelines
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I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?
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Hi Luke,
Just make sure that your robots.txt file located at https://www.example.com/robots.txt doesn't block search engine spiders. Of course there may be some folders or filetypes you want to block but it certainly shouldn't look like below which would block everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Hope that helps
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No that's not what they mean - it means Google recommends you allow the secure version of your site(where applicable) to be crawled. You can still block certain pages/sections should you choose to do so.
With regards to noindexing you could also place this on the actual page as an alternative.
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