How to use a wildcard in robots.txt?

by ervin.williamson , in category: SEO , 9 months ago

How to use a wildcard in robots.txt?

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1 answer

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by susan , 9 months ago

@ervin.williamson 

To use a wildcard in robots.txt, you can use the asterisk symbol (*) to represent any number of characters or any single character at a specific part of a URL. Here are a few examples:

  1. Disallow all URLs that start with a specific folder: User-agent: * Disallow: /folder/* This blocks all URLs that have anything after /folder/.
  2. Disallow specific file extensions: User-agent: * Disallow: /*.pdf$ This blocks all URLs that end with .pdf.
  3. Disallow URLs with a specific pattern: User-agent: * Disallow: /prefix-*suffix/ This blocks all URLs that have /prefix- at the start and /suffix/ at the end.


Please note that not all web crawlers or search engines necessarily support wildcards. It's recommended to test your robots.txt with various bots or consult the documentation of specific web crawlers to ensure compatibility.