Robots.txt file

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Web Robots (Crawlers, Web Wanderers or Spiders) are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Among many uses, search engines use them to index the web content. Robots.txt implements the REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol), which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names. Web administrators can Allow access to their web content and Disallow access to cgi, private and temporary directories, for example, if they do not want pages in those areas indexed.

Where to place my robots.txt file?

A standard robots.txt its included in your joomla root. The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain or subdomain and must be named robots.txt.

Joomla in a subdirectory

A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn't valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at e.g. example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be moved to the site root at e.g. example.com/robots.txt. Note: The joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/

Joomla robots.txt contents

This is the contents of a standard Joomla robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/

Robot exclusion

You can exclude directories or block robots from your site adding Disallow rule to robots.txt. E.g. to prevent any robots from visiting the /tmp directory, add the following rule:

Disallow: /tmp/

See also:

• A Standard for Robot Exclusion — specification of the robots.txt standard
• Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file

Syntax checking

For syntax checking you can use a validator for robots.txt files. Try one of these:

• Robots.txt Checker (by Motoricerca)
• Robots.txt Checker (by Frobee)
• robots.txt Checker (by Search Engine Promotion Help)

See also

For additional information please read:

Joomla! Documentation

• Creating a Custom 404 Error Page
• Custom error pages
• System error pages
• Making your site Search Engine Friendly
• Entering search engine meta-data

How to: Robots.txt and Joomla

• Joomla & Google Robots Text File
• How to set up the robots.txt file in Joomla

General information

• http://www.robotstxt.org/ — main website for robots.txt
• A Standard for Robot Exclusion — specification of the robots.txt standard
• Robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header specifications
• Robots.txt and Search Indexing

Tools for Webmasters

• Google Webmaster Tools