Moz campaign works around my robots.txt settings

[VinceWicks]

My robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*?

Disallow: /search

So, it should block (deindex) all dynamic URLs.

If I check this url in Google:

site:http://www.webdesign.org/search/page-1.html?author=47

Google tells me:

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

So far so good.

Now, I ran a Moz SEO campaign and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors.

One of the links is this one:

http://www.webdesign.org/search/page-1.html?author=47

(the same I tested in Google and it told me that the page is blocked by robots.txt which I want)

So, it makes me think that Moz campaigns check files regardless of what robots.txt say? It’s my understanding User-agent: * should forbid Rogerbot from crawling as well. Am I missing something?

[Abe_Schmidt]

Hello Vince, thank you for reaching out to us! This seems quite odd, our crawler usually obeys all robots.txt files. Let's try this. Add this code to your robots.txt:

Useragent: Rogerbot

Disallow: /

This should specifically instruct us to follow these rules. Once you have tried this, if it does not work, please send an email to help@moz.com and we will have our engineers dig in a bit further. Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope the above fix works for you.

[VinceWicks]

Thanks Abe.

I guess I'll try this:

Useragent: Rogerbot

Disallow: /*?

Because if I use Disallow: / I'll lose my current Moz reports because Rogerbot will just ignore all my file, right?

[VinceWicks]

That worked, thanks!