Simple robots.txt question

He has: 688 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

If I have "Disallow: /gallery/" in my robots.txt file, will that stop search engines (who listen to the rules) from indexing all the files and subfolders within that directory? Like /gallery/album5/ or do I need to make seperate disallows for every folder within /gallery/?

Thanks in advance.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

If the robots reads the robots txt file it wont go into or follow the path

I take it you have the complete thing:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gallery/

depending on your servers stats you may also want to throw up an .htacces file to stop people viewing your folders (if you dont have a default file like index.html in there)

They have: 42 posts

Joined: Jan 2005

For creating robots.txt files I use the free tool at:

http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool-robots.txt-generator.htm

Creates exactly what you want in your robots.txt file and has the useful capability of blocking 'nasty' robots (ones which don't index your site, just dowload your entire site to somebodies machine, wasting a large amount of your bandwidth)

James

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

wow! thankx for the information!!
anything else I can do to block personal content?

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

Just remember robots.txt shouldn't be used as the only means of protection, bad bots are bad bots for a reason, because they ignore the robots file.
The robots file is only a guideline for bots, the .htaccess is a command which can't be ignored

Depends what you want/need bja888

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Well... I password protected my blog site. oldbja888.com?Web-forums The mian page is a frame set. But you can get around the password by typeing in individual pages in the url. I can add ASP to all the pages and make sure they have thr framset open before they load but thats too much work. I just whan them to stop showing up when I search the net on google.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

if you are using cookies from the form, include a file on each page to see if the cookie is set, same for sessions, javascript is no good because you can just disable it

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