Robots.txt and Drupal

UPDATE: Please see the Drupal robots.txt tutorial on Drupalzilla.com...

Drupal 4.7 doesn't come with a robots.txt file. Drupal 5 does come with a robots.txt file, but it is not ideal. Many modules create duplicate content that you should block off with additional rules in the robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file attempts to keep search engines out of places that they shouldn't go. For example, a search engine should not be trying to index your comment reply pages.

This is the robots.txt file that comes with Drupal 5.1:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
# Directories
Disallow: /database/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /misc/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /sites/
Disallow: /themes/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /updates/
Disallow: /profiles/
# Files
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /update.php
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /INSTALL.mysql.txt
Disallow: /INSTALL.pgsql.txt
Disallow: /CHANGELOG.txt
Disallow: /MAINTAINERS.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /UPGRADE.txt
# Paths (clean URLs)
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /aggregator/
Disallow: /comment/reply/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /logout/
Disallow: /node/add/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /user/register/
Disallow: /user/password/
Disallow: /user/login/
# Paths (no clean URLs)
Disallow: /?q=admin/
Disallow: /?q=aggregator/
Disallow: /?q=comment/reply/
Disallow: /?q=contact/
Disallow: /?q=logout/
Disallow: /?q=node/add/
Disallow: /?q=search/
Disallow: /?q=user/password/
Disallow: /?q=user/register/
Disallow: /?q=user/login/

Below is a basic robots.txt file that should only be used on sites that have the following conditions:

• Clean URLs enabled
• Pathauto module installed that overrides posts from having paths that start with the text /node. I.e., there should be no content URLs on the site that look like this: http://example.com/node/55 — the following robots.txt file would prevent them from being crawled by search engine spiders.
• Read the comments in the robots.txt file below carefully!

(Note: I had to add extra # symbols to prevent the Drupal text filter from closing my <code> element with a </p> tag. That is why there are extra #s in the file.)


# block the Internet Archiver if you want the privacy
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
#
# All other robots
User-agent: *
# Directories
Disallow: /database/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /misc/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /sites/
Disallow: /themes/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /updates/
Disallow: /profiles/
#
# Files
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /update.php
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /INSTALL.mysql.txt
Disallow: /INSTALL.pgsql.txt
Disallow: /CHANGELOG.txt
Disallow: /MAINTAINERS.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /UPGRADE.txt
#
# Paths (clean URLs) -- modified from default!
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /aggregator/
Disallow: /comment/
Disallow: /contact
Disallow: /logout
Disallow: /search/
#
# Users
# I block my user's pages on most sites because they don't have much content. Only leave it unblocked if your user pages have good content on them.
# If you DON'T want your user's pages crawled, use this, otherwise delete it:
Disallow: /user
#
# If you do want your user pages indexed, then delete the line above and uncomment these
# Disallow: /user/register
# Disallow: /user/password
# Disallow: /user/login
#
# This prevents Drupal's default non-clean URLs from being indexed
Disallow: /?q=
#
# block tracker pages
Disallow: /tracker/
# block paginated tracker pages
Disallow: /tracker?
#
# IMPORTANT: THE FOLLOWING LINE BLOCKS ALL /node* URLs -- only use it if you do not have content with URLs like http://example.com/node/10. Alternatively use the Global Redirect module.
Disallow: /node
#
# Disallow robots from all but the main feed - requires Pathauto feed aliases turned on. Optionally only block Google from the following paths because it causes the most havoc with Google
Disallow: /*/feed
# Prevent print-friendly duplicate pages from being crawled
Disallow: /book/export/
# This is important for the Forward module
Disallow: /forward/
# This prevents duplicate content caused by some modules like the Forums and Views modules
Disallow: /*sort=
# Prevent duplicate content created by the Image module
Disallow: /*size=
# If you have the Front module this will keep a duplicate front page from being indexed
Disallow: /front_page
# If you use the Views module's frontpage this will keep the duplicate from being indexed
Disallow: /frontpage


The above robots.txt file is not complete, but gives a basic idea of things you have have to look out for when configuring your robots.txt file.

A future "Part 2" of this tutorial will show how to troubleshoot your Drupal robots.txt file and add additional rules that you might need based on your installed modules.