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.
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
-
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like:
staging.domain.com
User-agent: *
Disallow: /in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.
-
Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked.
-
I agree. The name of your subdomain being "staging" didn't register at all with me until Matt brought it up. I was offering a generic response to the subdomain question whereas I believe Matt focused on how to handle a staging site. Interesting viewpoint.
-
Matt/Ryan-
Great discussion, thanks for the input. The staging.domain.com is just one of the domains we don't want indexed. Some of them still need to be accessed by the public, some like staging could be restricted to specific IPs.
I realize after your discussion I probably should have used a different example of a sub-domain. On the other hand it might not have sparked the discussion so maybe it was a good example
-
.htaccess files can be placed at any directory level of a site so you can do it for just the subdomain or even just a directory of a domain.
-
Staging URL's are typically only used for testing so rather than do a deny I would recommend using a specific ALLOW for only the IP addresses that should be allowed access.
I would imagine you don't want it indexed because you don't want the rest of the world knowing about it.
You can also use HTACCESS to use username/passwords. It is simple but you can give that to clients if that is a concern/need.
-
Correct.
-
Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.
The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.
-
Hi Matt.
Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.
-
Interesting, hadn't thought of using htaccess to block Googlebot.Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Thanks Ryan. So you don't see any issues with de-indexing the main site if I created a second robots.txt file, e.g.
http://staging.domin.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /That was my initial thought but when Google announced they consider sub-domains part of the TLD I was afraid it might affect the htp://www.domain.com versions of the pages. So you're saying the subdomain is basically treated like a folder you block on the primary domain?
-
Use an .htaccess file to only allow from certain ip addresses or ranges.
Here is an article describing how: http://www.kirupa.com/html5/htaccess_tricks.htm
-
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Place a robots.txt file in the root of the subdomain.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /This method will block the subdomain while leaving your primary domain unaffected.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Are images stored in Amazon S3 buckets indexable to your domain?
We're storing all our images in S3 bucket, common practice, but we want to get these images to drive traffic back to our site -- and credit for that traffic. We've configured the URLs to be s3.owler.com/<image_name>/<image_id>. I've not seen any of these images show in our web master tools. I am wondering if we're actually not going to get the credit for these images because technically they do sit on another domain. </image_id></image_name>
Technical SEO | | mindofmiller0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Shopping Carts & Sub Domains
I was hoping someone could guide me in making the correct decision regarding integrating my existing domain with a hosted shopping cart. I have an existing website to promote my bricks and mortar retail operation and am expanding into web retailing. I will be using one of the major hosted shopping carts. What is the best way to join the two components from an SEO perspective? Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider and have both components operate under the same general domain? I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites. I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other. And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole. What is the truth? Which is the better way to go? Any guidance would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MEI1520 -
Do Backlinks to a PDF help with overall authority/link juice for the rest of the domain?
We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website. For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain. We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article. Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?
Technical SEO | | MattAaron0 -
Block a sub-domain from being indexed
This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines? One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag. Thanks! - Kyle
Technical SEO | | kchandler0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | | christinarule1