I have two sitemaps which partly duplicate - one is blocked by robots.txt but can't figure out why!
-
Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?
-
There are standards for the sitemaps .txt and .xml sitemaps, where there are no standards for html varieties. Neither guarantees the listed pages will be crawled, though. HTML has some advantage of potentially passing pagerank, where .txt and .xml varieties don't.
These days, xml sitemaps may be more common than .txt sitemaps but both perform the same function.
-
yes, sitemap.txt is blocked for some strange reason. I know SEOs do this sometimes for various reasons, but in this case it just doesn't make sense - not to me, anyway.
-
Thanks for the useful feedback Chris - much appreciated - Is it good practice to use both - I guess it's a good idea if onsite version only includes top-level pages? PS. Just checking nature of block!
-
Luke,
The .php one would have been created as a navigation tool to help users find what they're looking for faster, as well as to provide html links to search engine spiders to help them reach all pages on the site. On small sites, such sitemaps often include all pages of the site, on large ones, it might just be high level pages. The .txt file is non html and exists to provide search engines with a full list of urls on the site for the sole purpose of helping search engines index all the site's pages.
The robots.txt file can also be used to specify the location of the sitemap.txt file such as
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_location.txt
Are you sure the sitemap is being blocked by the robots.txt file or is the robots.txt file just listing the location of the sitemap.txt?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Robots.txt was set to disallow for 14 days
We updated our website and accidentally overwrote our robots file with a version that prevented crawling ( "Disallow: /") We realized the issue 14 days later and replaced after our organic visits began to drop significantly and we quickly replace the robots file with the correct version to begin crawling again. With the impact to our organic visits, we have a few and any help would be greatly appreciated - Will the site get back to its original status/ranking ? If so .. how long would that take? Is there anything we can do to speed up the process ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jc42540 -
Robots.txt, Disallow & Indexed-Pages..
Hi guys, hope you're well. I have a problem with my new website. I have 3 pages with the same content: http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1 (good page) http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=false http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=true The good page has rel=canonical & it is the only page should be appear in Search results but Google has indexed 3 pages... I don't know how should do now, but, i am thinking 2 posibilites: Remove filters (true, false) and leave only the good page and show 404 page for others pages. Update robots.txt with disallow for these parameters & remove those URL's manually Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
How to make Google index your site? (Blocked with robots.txt for a long time)
The problem is the for the long time we had a website m.imones.lt but it was blocked with robots.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
But after a long time we want Google to index it. We unblocked it 1 week or 8 days ago. But Google still does not recognize it. I type site:m.imones.lt and it says it is still blocked with robots.txt What should be the process to make Google crawl this mobile version faster? Thanks!0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Our Robots.txt and Reconsideration Request Journey and Success
We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others! A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed. At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools. Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries. From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited. A few weeks passed and things did not normalize. We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week. At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked. This did not change. Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked. We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize. Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked. We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request. This seemed to be our only hope. So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue. A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem. Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use. Major backfire. We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us. To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore. They did.... So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com. We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text. We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs. To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away! Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all. Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog. Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT. Then we waited... A few days later, we already had a response. DENIED. In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links. When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link. It was an interesting example. We actually already had this blog in removem. The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com. So, we went back to the drawing board. This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem. That added a few more links. We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links. We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress. We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials. We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest. A few days later, we had a message in WMT. DENIED AGAIN! This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove. The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google. Only a message in WMT. So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was. Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED! This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well. So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google. Our robots.txt issue. We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for. We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it. So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue. The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again. The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000! Success! We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero. So, some thoughts: 1. Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT? Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time? If the latter is the case then... 2. Did our reconsideration request backfire? Or, was it ultimately for the best? 3. When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known? If you want example links, ask for them. It never hurts to ask! If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be! 4. If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it. I wouldn't over do this or spam them. Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask. Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions. Thanks for reading! TheCraig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCraig5 -
Will blocking urls in robots.txt void out any backlink benefits? - I'll explain...
Ok... So I add tracking parameters to some of my social media campaigns but block those parameters via robots.txt. This helps avoid duplicate content issues (Yes, I do also have correct canonical tags added)... but my question is -- Does this cause me to miss out on any backlink magic coming my way from these articles, posts or links? Example url: www.mysite.com/subject/?tracking-info-goes-here-1234 Canonical tag is: www.mysite.com/subject/ I'm blocking anything with "?tracking-info-goes-here" via robots.txt The url with the tracking info of course IS NOT indexed in Google but IT IS indexed without the tracking parameters. What are your thoughts? Should I nix the robots.txt stuff since I already have the canonical tag in place? Do you think I'm getting the backlink "juice" from all the links with the tracking parameter? What would you do? Why? Are you sure? 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AubieJon0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0