Implementing an effective SEO robots.txt file for WordPress will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and increase your blog traffic. Using a robots.txt file gives you a search engine robots point of view… Sweet! Looking for the most updated robots.txt? Just Have you blocked the AdSense crawler’s access to your pages?
The AdSense crawler is an automated program that scans your web pages and tracks content for indexing. Sometimes we don’t crawl pages because the AdSense crawler doesn’t have access to your pages, in which case we’re unable to determine their content and show relevant ads. Here are a few specific instances when our crawler can’t access a site:
If you use a robots.txt file which regulates the crawler access to your page. In this case, you can grant the AdSense crawler access by adding these lines to the top of your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow:
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:
- Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
- Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
- Printer-only versions of web pages
However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.
Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
Prevent page from being indexed
Pages you block in this way may still be added to the Google index if other sites link to them. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information can appear in Google search results. However, no content from your pages will be crawled, indexed, or displayed.
To entirely prevent a page from being added to the Google index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag, and ensure that the page does not appear in robots.txt. When Googlebot crawls the page, it will recognize the noindex meta tag and drop the URL from the index.
Prevent content being indexed or remove content from Google’s index?
You can instruct us not to include content from your site in our index or to remove content from your site that is currently in our index in the following ways:
- Remove your entire website or part of your website using a robots.txt file.
- Remove individual pages of your website using a robots meta tag.
- Remove cached copies of your pages using a robots meta tag.
- Remove snippets that appear below your page’s title in our search results and describe the content of your page.
- Remove outdated pages by returning the proper server response.
- Remove images from Google Image Search using a robots.txt file.
- Remove blog entries from Google Blog Search.
- Remove a feed from our user-agent Feedfetcher, which provides content to our feed readers.
- Remove transcoded versions of your pages (pages we’ve reformatted for mobile browsers).
Google User-agents
- Adsbot-Google
- crawls pages to measure AdWords landing page quality
- Googlebot
- crawl pages from googles web and news index
- Googlebot-Image
- crawls pages for the image index
- Googlebot-Mobile
- crawls pages for the mobile index
- Mediapartners-Google
- crawls pages to determine AdSense content
Good Robots.txt Articles
- How Google Crawls My Site
- Using the robots.txt analysis tool
- Controlling how search engines access and index your website
- Controlling Access with robots.txt
- Removing duplicate search engine content using robots.txt – Mark Wilson
- Revisiting robots.txt – Twenty Steps
Robots Meta Tags
Robots Meta Examples
Stop all robots from indexing a page on your site, but still follow the links on the page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
Allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Googles bots from indexing the page
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,follow" />
Allow robots to index the page on your site but not to follow outgoing links
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
header.php Trick for Conditional Robots Meta
Add this to your header.php
<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_category() || is_home()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="all,noodp" />
<?php } ?>
<?php if(is_archive()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,noodp" />
<?php } ?>
<?php if(is_search() || is_404()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive" />
<?php } ?>
Robots.txt footnote
Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast are all guilty of firewalling unknown friendly search engine agents at the front gate. These sites that monitor the Internet should be the most in the know that unfriendly agents cloak as humans and will come in no matter what. So the general rule of thumb is that robots.txt directives are only for the good agents anyway.
Robots.txt References
- Robots.txt optimization
- The Web Robots Pages
- W3.org – Notes on helping search engines index your Web site
- Wikipedia robots.txt page
- Inside Google Sitemaps: Using a robots.txt file
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I am using the following in my
robots.txtfile on one of my directories. I noticed that I have over 1,700 pages and only 400 pages indexed by Google. My question is, which statements in myrobots.txtfile are causing the pages not to get index? Furthermore, do I actually need any of this in the robots.txt file?