The implementation of a suitable robots.txt file is very important for search engine optimization. There is plenty of advice around the Internet for the creation of such files (if you are looking for an introduction on this topic read “Creat a robots.txt file“), but what if instead of looking at what people say we could look at what people do?
That is what I did, collecting the robots.txt files from a wide range of blogs and websites. Below you will find them.
Key Takeaways
- Only 2 out of 30 websites that I checked were not using a robots.txt file
- Even if you don’t have any specific requirements for the search bots, therefore, you probably should use a simple robots.txt file
- Most people stick to the “User-agent: *” attribute to cover all agents
- The most common “Disallowed” factor is the RSS Feed
- Google itself is using a combination of closed folders (e.g., /searchhistory/) and open ones (e.g., /search), which probably means they are treated differently
- A minority of the sites included the sitemap URL on the robots.txt file
The Minimalistic Guys
Problogger.net
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Marketing Pilgrim
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Search Engine Journal
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Matt Cutts
User-agent: *
Allow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /files/
Pronet Advertising
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mt
Disallow: /*.cgi$
TechCrunch
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /*/trackback/
The Structured Ones
Online Marketing Blog
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: */feed/User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blogger/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /2005x/
Shoemoney
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /link.php
Disallow: /gallery2
Disallow: /gallery2/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /pages/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed
Scoreboard Media
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /2007/
Disallow: /2006/
Disallow: /wp-*
SEOMoz.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blogdetail.php?ID=537
Disallow: /blog?page
Disallow: /blog/author/
Disallow: /blog/category/
Disallow: /tracker
Disallow: /ugc?page
Disallow: /ugc/author/
Disallow: /ugc/category/
Wolf-Howl
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /noindex/
Disallow: /privacy-policy/
Disallow: /about/
Disallow: /company-biographies/
Disallow: /press-media-room/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /contact-us/
Disallow: /terms-of-service/
Disallow: /terms-of-service/
Disallow: /information/comment-policy/
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /contact-form/
Disallow: /advertising/
Disallow: /information/licensing-information/
Disallow: /2005/
Disallow: /2006/
Disallow: /2007/
Disallow: /2008/
Disallow: /2009/
Disallow: /2004/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /iframes/
John Chow
sitemap: http://www.johnchow.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /
Smashing Magazine
Sitemap: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:User-agent: *
Disallow: /styles/
Disallow: /inc/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /cc/
Disallow: /category/User-agent: MSIECrawler
Disallow: /User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 200
Gizmodo
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.xml$
Disallow: /excerpts.xml$
Allow: /sitemap.xml$
Disallow: /*view=rss$
Disallow: /*?view=rss$
Disallow: /*format=rss$
Disallow: /*?format=rss$
Sitemap: http://gizmodo.com/sitemap.xml
Lifehacker
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.xml$
Disallow: /excerpts.xml$
Allow: /sitemap.xml$
Disallow: /*view=rss$
Disallow: /*?view=rss$
Disallow: /*format=rss$
Disallow: /*?format=rss$
Sitemap: http://lifehacker.com/sitemap.xml
The Mainstream Media
Wall Street Journal
User-agent: *
Disallow: /article_email/
Disallow: /article_print/
Disallow: /PA2VJBNA4R/
Sitemap: http://online.wsj.com/sitemap.xml
ZDNet
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Ads/
Disallow: /redir/
# Disallow: /i/ is removed per 202323
Disallow: /av/
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /clear/
Disallow: /mac-ad
Disallow: /adlog/
# URS per bug 239819, these were expanded
Disallow: /1300-
Disallow: /1301-
Disallow: /1302-
Disallow: /1303-
Disallow: /1304-
Disallow: /1305-
Disallow: /1306-
Disallow: /1307-
Disallow: /1308-
Disallow: /1309-
Disallow: /1310-
Disallow: /1311-
Disallow: /1312-
Disallow: /1313-
Disallow: /1314-
Disallow: /1315-
Disallow: /1316-
Disallow: /1317-
NY Times
# robots.txt, www.nytimes.com 6/29/2006
#
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pages/college/
Disallow: /college/
Disallow: /library/
Disallow: /learning/
Disallow: /aponline/
Disallow: /reuters/
Disallow: /cnet/
Disallow: /partners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /indexes/
Disallow: /thestreet/
Disallow: /nytimes-partners/
Disallow: /financialtimes/
Allow: /pages/
Allow: /2003/
Allow: /2004/
Allow: /2005/
Allow: /top/
Allow: /ref/
Allow: /services/xml/User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
YouTube
# robots.txt file for YouTube
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile
Disallow: /results
Disallow: /browse
Disallow: /t/terms
Disallow: /t/privacy
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /watch_ajax
Disallow: /watch_queue_ajax
Bonus
User-agent: *
Allow: /searchhistory/
Disallow: /news?output=xhtml&
Allow: /news?output=xhtml
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /groups
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /catalogs
Disallow: /catalogues
Disallow: /news
Disallow: /nwshp
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /addurl/image?
Disallow: /pagead/
Disallow: /relpage/
Disallow: /relcontent
Disallow: /sorry/
Disallow: /imgres
Disallow: /keyword/
Disallow: /u/
Disallow: /univ/
Disallow: /cobrand
Disallow: /custom
Disallow: /advanced_group_search
Disallow: /advanced_search
Disallow: /googlesite
Disallow: /preferences
Disallow: /setprefs
Disallow: /swr
Disallow: /url
Disallow: /default
Disallow: /m?
Disallow: /m/search?
Disallow: /wml?
Disallow: /wml/search?
Disallow: /xhtml?
Disallow: /xhtml/search?
Disallow: /xml?
Disallow: /imode?
Disallow: /imode/search?
Disallow: /jsky?
Disallow: /jsky/search?
Disallow: /pda?
Disallow: /pda/search?
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
Hi,
I use the All in one SEO plugin on most of my sites. Will this automatically insert a robot.txt file for me? I have heard about this before, but to be honest I kinda overlooked it and didn’t think it was too important, however now I am a little worried that I am missing a vital trick here.
I would guess that wordpress automatically create the robot.txt file for you, but just double checking?
Thanks
hi…nice to see this…but can anyone tell me…whatis the function of these lines in robots.txt…
“User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.xml$
Disallow: /excerpts.xml$”
i have seen these lines used gizmodo and other bloggers..
should these 2 lines help in removing duplicate content??
pls i want the answer..
thanks
nice stuff, you make ideas for me to change my robots.txt
Should the /wp-content folder be included as well…where all the themes and plugins reside? I’ve not noticed it listed on any robot.txt file anywhere..
Thanks.
But, my blogspot’s robot.txt is not editable..
Nice collection – this will help me and new webmaster and web designer to create a robots.txt file as they want
Hello…!
Can anyone tell me the list of websites which archives the websites. Pandora, Internet archive’s Waybackmachine are the some of the examples, I want to know the entire web archiving websites, please…..
I got to know more about the “robots.txt” in this article.
Thanks.
Very good learning
The real benefit to learning about the robots.txt file and how it works is it teaches you to think like the web crawlers. Especially when you start targeting different user-agents/bots…
webmasterworld is definately the coolest, and 2nd is of course askapache.com
Your site found in Google:
I have visited your site 623-times
The effect upon individual ranking of your pages should not be huge, so do not expect to go from the tenth page to the first page of Google just because of using a robots.txt file.
That said, your search engine traffic will probably increase a lot if many of your pages were in the supplemental hell. First and foremost because now you will be cover many more keywords and terms.
I’d like to echo Zath’s question, since my number of indexed pages has gone down too..will it affect SERPs?
Hmm. I haven’t thought yet to update my robot.txt
Its as simple as problogger.net no complications 😉
I actually avoided that part coz I am not that much aware of robot.txt file changes and its effects!
Soon will give some time for that.
Thanks for the advice anyway.
Hmm. I have not thinked yest to update my robot.txt
Its as simple as problogger.net no complications 😉
I actually avoided that part coz I am not that much aware of robot.txt file changes and its effects!
Soon will give some time for that.
Thanks for the advice anyway.
I recently set up a robots.txt file and have noticed that my supplemental links on Google have gone down from around 2023 pages to about 250.
I’m thinking that’s pretty good, but like others have said, I’m not quite sure how much of a difference it makes to my site rankings.
Will this give more search engine traffic going forward or increase the chances of a better Pagerank?
>Wow, I’m surprised that so many SEO experts don’t include a line for sitemap autodiscovery. It’s not like it’s difficult to implement or anything
If you have a Google sitemap plugin for WordPress it pingfs google every time you post anyway.
And:
The robots.txt for webmasterworld.com has a blog in it. Fun.
i have this, list of robots.txt links. you can see here: Big Websites with Big Robots
I am also tweaking my robots.txt to remove duplicate content in WordPress. It was very insightful to see how top sites are dealing with the issue.
What timing! I was just contemplating roboting out my category and archive pages. Thanks for this!
I have been tweaking my robots.txt file for quite some time now mostly to reduce duplicate content (get pages out of supplemental hell)but haven’t noticed any appreciable difference.
I have been checking a few A-bloggers blogs for their robots.txt files so thanks for doing this.
BTW why does Shoemoney disallow some directories with and without the forward slash? What is the difference?
Adnan, I will need to tweak mine as well. So far I am getting pretty good results with a minimalistic one though, just exclusing feeds, trackbacks and WP files.
Hey Daniel – thanks for that compilation – its very interesting to see how some SEO sites like SearchEngineJournal were minimal, but how SEOMoz has something different.
Now I need to decide on which one to choose 😉
While crawling around the interweb a few days ago, I found the robots.txt file for the whitehouse (whitehouse.gov/robots.txt)
I just thought it interesting the things they disallowed.
Very interesting post. I actually started using something similar to Chow’s after he published it on his blog last week. It seems to be adding a bit of Google traffic.
Nia, sorry for that I just updated the article with a link to an introductory post I wrote sometime ago:
This looks valuable except I don’t know how to use it yet. I’ve put it in my RSS shares and when I figure it out I’ll implement the lesson and post about it. Thanks. 😉
nice stuff, i already changed my robots.txt
Stephen, I don’t think the “autodiscovery” factor is related to how easy it is to implement.
The question is: will it bring tangible improvements?
Wow, I’m surprised that so many SEO experts don’t include a line for sitemap autodiscovery. It’s not like it’s difficult to implement or anything…