Few days ago I set robots.txt for my website which you find in below:
user-agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
Now I am facing some problem to submit my sitemap in Google Webmaster:
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.
I got this reply and also get:
URL restricted by robots.txt
Now what can I do to submit my sitemap in Webmaster?
Your robots.txt disallows accessing any URL except the root (/, e.g.: http://example.com/). So bots are (per your robots.txt) not allowed to crawl your sitemap.
You could add another Allow line (like below), but in general there is probably no point in having a sitemap if you disallow crawling all pages except the homepage.
User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Allow: /sitemap.xml$
Disallow: /
(I removed the empty lines, because they are not allowed inside a record.)
Note that you could also link your sitemap from the robots.txt.
We are just getting started with SEO/Ajax so hoping someone can help us figure this out - One of the #! urls is showing up as the first organic result for our startup nurturelist.com. Although this link technically works, we would 1) not like to have any #! urls show up in search results because they look weird and we have non #! versions 2) the second organic result in the image is the one that we'd actually like to appear at the top.
Thanks very much on any thoughts on how we can make this happen...
Do you just simply not want the #! to show up in search results? Simply make a robots.txt in your root directory (in most cases the public_html directory) and add these lines to it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /\#!/
This prevents Google from indexing all pages under the /#!/ subdirectory.
However:
If the page has already been indexed by Googlebot, using a robots.txt
file won't remove it from the index. You'll either have to use the
Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool after you apply the
robots.txt, or instead you can add a noindex command to the page via a
tag or X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP Headers.
(Source)
Here is a link to the Google Webmaster Tools URL Removal Tool
So add this to pages you don't want indexed:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
I am using "WordPress SEO by Yoast" plugin in my website http://www.goopro.org/ for seo and sitemap. But it shown me 404 error.
Here is sitemap url...
http://www.goopro.org/sitemap_index.xml
Please suggest why this error occurred. And How can I resolve it.
Under the plugin settings for Yoast, have you checked the box to allow XML sitemap ?
I would check that the file sitemap.xml is in the root directory of your website as it doesn't seem to be in there according to the 404 error you are receiving.
I have a master sitemap that contains links to other site maps that is accessable on a path like:
www.website.com/sitemap.xml
I wanted to ask if this is enough for the search engines or if I need to link this to my site?
linking - I know I can use a robots.txt file but I is it possible to just add a link to the head of the site - something like (and I'm just guessing):
<head>
<link rel="sitemap" type="application/xml" title="Sitemap" href="/sitemap.xml">
</head>
thankyou
Adam
This is totally okay.
Sitemap should always be located in the root and that is the only place where the search engines will look.
I suggest you to use a Google Webmasters tool to submit a sitemap for your domain so you can get indexed and you can monitor search engine behavior.
Hopefully this info will help you.
I have been searching around using Google but I can't find an answer to this question.
A robots.txt file can contain the following line:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex.xml
but is it possible to specify multiple sitemap index files in the robots.txt and have the search engines recognize that and crawl ALL of the sitemaps referenced in each sitemap index file? For example, will this work:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex2.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemapindex3.xml
Yes it is possible to have more than one sitemap-index-file:
You can have more than one Sitemap index file.
Highlight by me.
Yes it is possible to list multiple sitemap-files within robots.txt, see as well in the sitemap.org site:
You can specify more than one Sitemap file per robots.txt file.
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host2.xml
Highlight by me, this can not be misread I'd say, so simply spoken, this can be done.
This is also necessary for cross-submits, for which btw. the robots.txt has been chosen.
Btw Google, Yahoo and Bing, all are members of sitemaps.org:
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
So you can rest assured that your sitemap entries will be properly read by the search engine bots.
Submitting them via webmaster tools can not hurt either - as John Mueller commented.
If your sitemap is over 10 MB (uncompressed) or has more than 50 000 entries Google requires that you use multiple sitemaps bundled with a Sitemap Index File.
Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)
In your robots.txt point to a sitemap index which should look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2012-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2012-01-01</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
It's recommended to create a sitemap index file, rather separate XML URLs to put in your your robots.txt file.
Then, put the indexed sitemap URL as below in your robots.txt file.
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
If you want to learn how to create indexed sitemap URL, then follow this guide from sitemap.org
Best Practice:
Create image sitemap, video sitemap separately if your website has huge number of such contents.
Check spelling of robots file, it should be robots.txt, don't use robot.txt or any misspelling.
Put robots.txt file in root directly only.
For more info, you can visit robots.txt's official website.
You need specify in your in your file sitemap.xml this code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.exemple.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.exemple.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=fr#
It is possible to write them, but it is up to the search engine to know what to do with it. I suspect many search engines will either "keep digesting" more and more tokens, or alternatively, take the last sitemap they find as the real one.
I propose that the question be "if I want ____ search engine to index my site, would I be able to define multiple sitemaps?"