Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
-
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt.
For example:
Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine
However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed.
The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
-
Yes, wildcards work, thank god.
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
-
Can some sort of wildcard redirect be used on a single folder path?
We have a directory with thousands of pages and we are migrating the entire site to another root URL. These folder paths will not change on the new site, but we don't want to use a wildcard to redirect EVERYTHING to the same folder path on the new site. Setting up manual 301 redirects on this particular directory would be crazy. Is there a way to isolate something like a wildcard redirect to apply only to a specific folder? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Robots.txt: how to exclude sub-directories correctly?
Hello here, I am trying to figure out the correct way to tell SEs to crawls this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/ But not this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory/ or this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/sub-directory/... But with the fact I have thousands of sub-directories with almost infinite combinations, I can't put the following definitions in a manageable way: disallow: /directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/subdirectory/ etc... I would end up having thousands of definitions to disallow all the possible sub-directory combinations. So, is the following way a correct, better and shorter way to define what I want above: allow: /directory/$ disallow: /directory/* Would the above work? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau1 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0
