I want to stop search engines from crawling my whole website.
I have a web application for members of a company to use. This is hosted on a web server so that the employees of the company can access it. No one else (the public) would need it or find it useful.
So I want to add another layer of security (In Theory) to try and prevent unauthorized access by totally removing access to it by all search engine bots/crawlers. Having Google index our site to make it searchable is pointless from the business perspective and just adds another way for a hacker to find the website in the first place to try and hack it.
I know in the robots.txt you can tell search engines not to crawl certain directories.
Is it possible to tell bots not to crawl the whole site without having to list all the directories not to crawl?
Is this best done with robots.txt or is it better done by .htaccess or other?
Using robots.txt to keep a site out of search engine indexes has one minor and little-known problem: if anyone ever links to your site from any page indexed by Google (which would have to happen for Google to find your site anyway, robots.txt or not), Google may still index the link and show it as part of their search results, even if you don't allow them to fetch the page the link points to.
If this might be a problem for you, the solution is to not use robots.txt, but instead to include a robots meta tag with the value noindex,nofollow on every page on your site. You can even do this in a .htaccess file using mod_headers and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header:
Header set X-Robots-Tag noindex,nofollow
This directive will add the header X-Robots-Tag: noindex,nofollow to every page it applies to, including non-HTML pages like images. Of course, you may want to include the corresponding HTML meta tag too, just in case (it's an older standard, and so presumably more widely supported):
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
Note that if you do this, Googlebot will still try to crawl any links it finds to your site, since it needs to fetch the page before it sees the header / meta tag. Of course, some might well consider this a feature instead of a bug, since it lets you look in your access logs to see if Google has found any links to your site.
In any case, whatever you do, keep in mind that it's hard to keep a "secret" site secret very long. As time passes, the probability that one of your users will accidentally leak a link to the site approaches 100%, and if there's any reason to assume that someone would be interested in finding the site, you should assume that they will. Thus, make sure you also put proper access controls on your site, keep the software up to date and run regular security checks on it.
It is best handled with a robots.txt file, for just bots that respect the file.
To block the whole site add this to robots.txt in the root directory of your site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To limit access to your site for everyone else, .htaccess is better, but you would need to define access rules, by IP address for example.
Below are the .htaccess rules to restrict everyone except your people from your company IP:
Order allow,deny
# Enter your companies IP address here
Allow from 255.1.1.1
Deny from all
If security is your concern, and locking down to IP addresses isn't viable, you should look into requiring your users to authenticate in someway to access your site.
That would mean that anyone (google, bot, person-who-stumbled-upon-a-link) who isn't authenticated, wouldn't be able to access your pages.
You could bake it into your website itself, or use HTTP Basic Authentication.
https://www.httpwatch.com/httpgallery/authentication/
In addition to the provided answers, you can stop search engines from crawling/indexing a specific page on your website in .robot.text. Below is an example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /example-page/
The above example is especially handy when you have dynamic pages, otherwise, you may want to add the below HTML meta tag on the specific pages you want to be disallowed from search engines:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Related
I want to disallow all the bots to crawl specific type of pages. I know this can be done via robots.txt as well as .htaccess. However, these pages are generated from the database from the user's request. I have searched the internet and could not get a good answer for doing so.
My link looks like:
http://www.my_website/some_controller/some_action/download?id=<encrypted_id>
There is a view page for the users wherein all the data that is displayed comes from the database including the kind of links that I have mentioned before. I want to hide those links from the bots and not the entire page. How can I do that?
Could the page not be generated with a
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
in the head?
you cannot hide stuff from bots but make it available to other traffic, afterall how do you distinguish between a bot and regular traffic... you cant without some sort of verification like them pictures of a word you type in a box.
Robots.txt does not stop bots, most bots will look at it and that will stop them out of there own choice, however that is only because they are programmed to do so. They do not have to do this and therefore if they wish can ignore robots.txt completely.
I'm trying to prevent web search crawlers from indexing certain private pages on my web server. The instructions are to include these in the robots.txt file and place it into the root of my domain.
But I have an issue with such approach, mainly, anyone can go to www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt and see the results as such:
# robots.txt for Sites
# Do Not delete this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /php/dontvisit.php
Disallow: /hiddenfolder/
that will tell anyone the pages I don't want anyone to go to.
Any idea how to avoid this?
PS. Here's an example of a page that I don't want to be exposed to the public: PayPal validation page for my software license payment. The page logic will not let a dud request through, but it wastes bandwidth (for PayPal connection, as well as for validation on my server) plus it logs a connection-attempt entry into the database.
PS2. I don't know how the URL for this page got out "to the public". It is not listed anywhere but with the PayPal and via .php scripts on my server. The name of the page itself is something like: /php/ipnius726.php so it's not something simple that a crawler can just guess.
URLs are public. End of discussion. You have to assume that if you leave a URL unchanged for long enough, it'll be visited.
What you can do is:
Secure access to the functionality behind those URLs
Ask people nicely not to visit them
There are many ways to achieve number 1, but the simplest way would be with some kind of session token given to authorized users.
Number 2 is achieved using robots.txt, as you mention. The big crawlers will respect the contents of that file and leave the pages listed there alone.
That's really all you can do.
You can put the stuff you want to keep both uncrawled and obscure into a subfolder. So, for instance, put the page in /hiddenfolder/aivnafgr/hfaweufi.php (where aivnafgr is the only subfolder of hiddenfolder, but just put hiddenfolder in your robots.txt.
If you put your "hidden" pages under a subdirectory, something like private, then you can just Disallow: /private without exposing the names of anything within that directory.
Another trick I've seen suggested is to create a sort of honeypot for dishonest robots by explicitly listing a file that isn't actually part of your site, just to see who requests it. Something like Disallow: /honeypot.php, and you know that any requests for honeypot.php are from a client that's scraping your robots.txt, so you can blacklist that User-Agent string or IP address.
You said you don’t want to rewrite your URLs (e.g., so that all disallowed URLs start with the same path segment).
Instead, you could also specify incomplete URL paths, which wouldn’t require any rewrite.
So to disallow /php/ipnius726.php, you could use the following robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /php/ipn
This will block all URLs whose path starts with /php/ipn, for example:
http://example.com/php/ipn
http://example.com/php/ipn.html
http://example.com/php/ipn/
http://example.com/php/ipn/foo
http://example.com/php/ipnfoobar
http://example.com/php/ipnius726.php
This is to supplement David Underwood's and unor's answers (not having enough rep points I am left with just answering the question). Recent digging is showing that Google has a clause that allows them to ignore the previously respected robots file on top of other security concerns. The link is a blog from Zac Gery explaining the new(er) policy and some simple explanations of how to "force" Google search engine to be nice. I realize this isn't precisely what you are looking for but on the QA and security side, I have found it to be very useful.
http://zacgery.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-robotstxt-file-is-no-longer.html
I'm looking for an advice and the method to so;
I have a folder on my domain where I am testing a certain landing page;
If it goes well I'll might build a new website and domain with this landing page,
and that's the main reasons I don't want it to get crawled, so I won't be punished by Google for duplicate content. I also don't want unwanted bots to scrape this landing page, as no good can come out of it. does it make sense to you?
If so, how can I do this? I don't think robots.txt is the best method as I understood that not all crawlers respect it, and even google may not fully respect it. I can't put a password since the landing page should be open to all humans (so the solution must not cause any problem to human visitors). does it leave the .htaccess file? If so, what code should I add there? are there any downsides I didn't get?
Thanks!
Use robots.txt file with following content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /some-folder/
We want to open a new domain for certain purposes (call them PR). The thing is we want the domain to point to the same website we currently have.
We do not want this new domain to appear on search engines (specifically Google) at all.
Options we've ruled out:
Robots.txt can't be used - it will work the same on both domains, which isn't what we want.
The rel=canonical doesn't block - only suggests to index a similar page instead. The original page might end up being indexed.
Is there a way to handle this?
EDIT
Regarding .htaccess suggestions: we're on IIS7.
rel=canonical is not a suggestion. It tells Google exactly which page to use.
Having said that, when serving pages that are in the domain you do not want indexed you can use the `x-robots-tag- to block those pages from being indexed:
Simply add any supported META tag to a new X-Robots-Tag directive in
the HTTP Header used to serve the file.
Don't include this document in the Google search results:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Have you tried setting your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools?
The drawback to this approach is that it doesn't work for other search engines.
I would block via say a .htaccess file on the domain in question at the root of the site.
BrowserMatchNoCase SpammerRobot bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_bot
Where you'd have to specify the different bots used by the major search engines.
Or you could allow all known webbrowsers and white list them instead.
I have a domain with a loto of indexed pages, I use this one as a online test domain. I understand that I should test it on a intranet or somewhat, but in time Google indexed a few websites which are not relavent anymore.
Does anyone know how to get a domain totlally unindexed from the most search engines?
There is a couple things you can do.
Set up a restrictive robots.txt file
Password protect the domain root
Request removal directly from SEs
If you have a static ip and you are the only one accessing the site, you can simply deny access to any ips other than yours.
Place a robots.txt file in the root directory of your webpage. It can be used to control how much access search engine spiders have to your content. You can specify certain areas of your site off limits to indexing, on a directory-by-directory basis.
Remove alias domain if you have
Remove url redirect from old to new
so that Search Engines can slowly de-index your old domain.