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 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 -
Awesome! yea I submitted them to bing and google by hand, I just figured it couldn't hurt to have it in my robots too.
Appreciate the feedback
-
Yes, what you have is the proper format. The best way to submit sitemaps, of course, is to submit them via Google & Bing Webmaster Tools.
Sitemaps won't have much impact on your site unless you have a really large site, so I wouldn't focus on them too much. The best way to get content crawled & indexed by Google is good internal link structure and authoritative external links.
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
-
URL structure for same product in multiple categories?
Hello everyone ! I am building an ecom store using wordpress. I have assigned multiple categories to the same product. What should be the URL structure when users are navigating with different product categories? Categories Assigned: tshirt, blue, striped
Technical SEO | | Dingos
Product Name: blue-striped-tshirt Option 01: Matching site navigation breadcrumb to product url URL - ecomstore.com/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt
Breadcrumb - home/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt URL - ecomstore.com/blue/blue-striped-tshirt (canonical to 1 product page)
Breadcrumb - home/color/blue/blue-striped-tshirt URL - ecomstore.com/striped/blue-striped-tshirt (canonical to 1 product page)
Breadcrumb - home/type/striped/blue-striped-tshirt Option 02: Same product urls and different breadcrumbs based on user site navigation URL - ecomstore.com/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt
Breadcrumb - home/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt URL - ecomstore.com/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt (url same as 1 product page)
Breadcrumb - home/color/blue/blue-striped-tshirt URL - ecomstore.com/tshirt/blue-striped-tshirt (url same as 1 product page)
Breadcrumb - home/type/striped/blue-striped-tshirt I have decided to got with Option 01 so that the product in each category can be ranked according to each category keyword. Which option is the best according to your experience or is there any other best practice?0 -
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
Technical SEO | | Nomader1 -
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
Hi! The Problem We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them. The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed. Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions? Thanks for any input on this one. PmHmG
Technical SEO | | AlisonMills0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Good robots txt for magento
Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob0 -
I have a GoDaddy website and have multiple homepages
I have GoDaddy website builder and a new website http://ecuadorvisapros.com and I notices through your crawl test that there are 3 home pages http://ecuadorvisapros with a 302 temporary redirect, http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com/ with no redirect and http://www.ecuadorvisapros/home.html. GoDaddy says there is only one home page. Is this going to kill my chances of having a successful website and can this be fixed? Or can it. I actually went with the SEO version thinking it would be better, but it wants to auto change my settings that I worked so hard at with your sites help. Please keep it simple, I am a novice although I have had websites in the past I know more about the what's than the how's of websites. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ScottR.0 -
Block Domain in robots.txt
Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Multiple Domains on 1 IP Address
We have multiple domains on the same C Block IP Address. Our main site is an eCommerce site, and we have separate domains for each of the following: our company blog (and other niche blogs), forum site, articles site and corporate site. They are all on the same server and hosted by the same web-hosting company. They all have unique and different content. Speaking strictly from a technical standpoint, could this be hurting us? Can you please make a recommendation for the best practices when it comes to multiple domains like these and having separate or the same IP Addresses? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Motivators0