Robots.txt Allows All but Several Subdirectories

Question

I want my site to be indexed in search engines, with the exception of a few subdirectories. The following are the robots.txt settings:

robots.txt in the root directory

 User-agent: * Allow: / 

Separate robots.txt in a subdirectory (exclude)

 User-agent: * Disallow: / 

Is this correct, or will the root rule override the subdirectory rule?

Answer 1

No, this is wrong.

You do not have a robots.txt file in a subdirectory. Your robots.txt should be placed in the root directory of your host document .

If you want to prevent crawling of URLs that start with /foo , use this entry in the robots.txt file ( http://example.com/robots.txt ):

 User-agent: * Disallow: /foo 

This allows you to bypass everything (so there is no need for Allow ) except URLs such as

• http://example.com/foo
• http://example.com/foo/
• http://example.com/foo.html
• http://example.com/foobar
• http://example.com/foo/bar
• ...

Answer 2

Yes there is

 User-agent: * Disallow: / 

This directive is useful if you are developing a new website and do not want search engines to index your incomplete website. In addition, you can get extended information on the right here.

Answer 3

You can manage them using the robots.txt file, which is located in the root directory. Make sure you have enable disallow patterns.