XML and Disallow

[DRSearchEngOpt]

I was just curious about any potential side effects of a client Basically utilizing a catch-all solution through the use of a spider for generating their XML Sitemap and then disallowing some of the directories in the XML sitemap in the robots.txt.

i.e.
XML contains 500 URLs
50 URLs contain /dirw/
I don't want anything with /dirw/ indexed just because they are fairly useless.  No content, one image.

They utilize the robots.txt file to " disallow: /dirw/ "

Lets say they do this for maybe 3 separate directories making up roughly 30% of the URL's in the XML sitemap.

I am just advising they re-do the sitemaps because that shouldn't be too dificult but I am curious about the actual ramifications of this other than "it isn't a clear and concise indication to the SE and therefore should be made such" if there are any.

Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

For syntax I think you'll want:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dirw/

If the content of /dirw/ isn't worthwhile to the engines then it should be fine to disallow. It's important to note though that Google asks for CSS and Javascript to not be disallowed. Run the site through their Page Speed tool to see how this setup currently impacts that interaction. Cheers!

[DirkC]

Hi Thomas,

I don't think that technically there is a problem with adding url's to a sitemap & then blocking part of them with robots.txt.

I wouldn't do it however - and I would give the same advice as you did: regenerate the sitemap without this content. Main reason would be that it goes against the main goals of a sitemap: helping bots to crawl your site and to provide valuable metadata (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en). Another advantage is that Google indicates the % of url's of each sitemap which is index. From that perspective, url's which are blocked for indexing have no use in a sitemap. Normally webmaster tools will generate errors, to let you know that there are issues with the sitemap.

If you take it one step further, Google could consider you a bit of a lousy webmaster, if you keep these url's in the sitemap. Not sure if this is the case, but for something which can easily be corrected, not sure if I would take this risk (even if it's a very minor one).

There are crawlers (like screamingfrog) which can generate sitemaps, while respecting the directives of the robots.txt - this would in my opinion be a better option.

rgds,

Dirk