Robots.txt in subfolders and hreflang issues
-
A client recently rolled out their UK business to the US. They decided to deploy with 2 WordPress installations:
UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt
US site - https://www.clientname.com/us/ - robots.txt location: UK site - https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txtWe've had various issues with /us/ pages being indexed in Google UK, and /uk/ pages being indexed in Google US.
They have the following hreflang tags across all pages:
We changed the x-default page to .com 2 weeks ago (we've tried both /uk/ and /us/ previously).
Search Console says there are no hreflang tags at all.
Additionally, we have a robots.txt file on each site which has a link to the corresponding sitemap files, but when viewing the robots.txt tester on Search Console, each property shows the robots.txt file for https://www.clientname.com only, even though when you actually navigate to this URL (https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt) you’ll get redirected to either https://www.clientname.com/uk/robots.txt or https://www.clientname.com/us/robots.txt depending on your location.
Any suggestions how we can remove UK listings from Google US and vice versa?
-
Hi there!
Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:
A **
robots.txt
**file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlersFrom Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.
You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!
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
-
Google not detecting hreflang tags
Hey guys, Recently (approx 1 month ago) did a migration from the .co.uk version of our site to .com/en. We've been doing a migration every few months to get everything under our .com. Previous migrations haven't had any problems at all, and hreflang tags detected correctly. For this new UK migration (that was done 1 month ago) google is saying that it doesn't detect any hreflang tags. We place our hreflang tags in our sitemap and so far we haven't had any problems with it. Here's the sitemap: https://camaloon.com/en/web-sitemap.xml Any thoughts on what could be happening? I really appreciate your input and help 🙌
Technical SEO | | mooj0 -
Google Cache issue
Hi, We’ve got a really specific issue – we have an SEO team in-house, and have had numerous agencies look at this – but no one can get to the bottom of this. We’re a UK travel company with a number of great positions on the search engines – our brand is www.jet2holidays.com. If you try ‘Majorca holidays’, ‘tenerife holidays’, ‘gran canaria holidays’ etc you’ll see us in the top few positions on Google when searching from the UK. However, none of our destination pages (and it’s only the destination pages), show a ‘cached’ option next to them. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=majorca+holidays&oq=majorca+holidays&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3.2151j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 This isn’t affecting our rankings, but we’re fairly certain it is affecting our ability to be included in the Featured Snippets. Checked and there aren’t any noarchive tags on the pages, example: https://www.jet2holidays.com/destinations/balearics/majorca Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | fredgray0 -
Hreflang tag implementation
Hi Mozzers, For an international client, we want to install hreflang tags for 3 different languages for their website in Belgium: dutch, french and english. The dutch version (nl-be) and the french version (fr-be) can perfectly be installed, but our developer has troubles implementing the english version (en-be). According to ISO 639-1 , "en-be" is apparently not supported. Unfortunately, we can't generalize the hreflang tags (), because our client has different websites in each country, so we need to specifically target Belgium here. Does anyone have a solution? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps
Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Robots.txt checker
Google seems to have discontinued their robots.txt checker. Is there another tool that I can use to check my text instead? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Robots.txt for subdomain
Hi there Mozzers! I have a subdomain with duplicate content and I'd like to remove these pages from the mighty Google index. The problem is: the website is build in Drupal and this subdomain does not have it's own robots.txt. So I want to ask you how to disallow and noindex this subdomain. Is it possible to add this to the root robots.txt: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Partouter
Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /subdomain.root.nl/ Thank you in advance! Partouter0 -
Robots exclusion
Hi All, I have an issue whereby print versions of my articles are being flagged up as "duplicate" content / page titles. In order to get around this, I feel that the easiest way is to just add them to my robots.txt document with a disallow. Here is my URL make up: Normal article: www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345 Print version of my article www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345&printversion=yes I know that having dynamic parameters in my URL is not best practise to say the least, but I'm stuck with this for the time being... My question is, how do I add just the print versions of articles to my robots file without disallowing articles too? Can I just add the parameter to the document like so? Disallow: &printversion=yes I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier... Many thanks in advance. Matt
Technical SEO | | Horizon0