Is your search engine not indexing important pages on your site properly? You might be experiencing issues with certain paths being blocked by robots.txt settings, causing them to be omitted from search results. In this post, I'll share a similar situation I encountered and how I resolved it.

Attempts and Pitfalls

At first, I naturally assumed there was a syntax error in the robots.txt file itself, or that it contained incorrect directives. So, I meticulously reviewed the file's contents again.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /chat

I suspected that a setting like this, blocking the /chat path, was the culprit. This path indeed contained a lot of content related to the user interface.

However, the robots.txt syntax was perfect, and there seemed to be no issues with other search engine-related settings. I spent hours poring over documentation related to robots.txt, but struggled to find a clear solution. The "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" warning kept appearing in the search engine's developer tools.

The Cause

In the end, the problem wasn't an error in the robots.txt file itself, but rather that the blocking setting was unintentionally preventing important pages from being indexed. Specifically, some pages within the /chat path contained crucial content that the search engine needed to index, and blocking the entire path with Disallow was the mistake.

The Solution

The solution was surprisingly simple. Instead of blocking the entire /chat path, I modified the settings to explicitly block only the specific sub-paths that I genuinely wanted search engines to avoid.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /chat/private-conversations/

With this change, other pages under /chat can still be indexed, while only the sensitive content located in the /chat/private-conversations/ path is blocked.

The Result

• Search engines began indexing the relevant pages of my site correctly.
• The "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" warning in the developer tools disappeared.
• I observed an overall improvement in my site's search visibility.

In Summary — To Avoid the Same Pitfall

• [ ] When configuring robots.txt, double-check if the paths specified in Disallow are unintentionally blocking access to important pages.
• [ ] Consider explicitly specifying only the sub-paths that absolutely need to be blocked, rather than blocking an entire path.
• [ ] After making changes to robots.txt, always verify the changes using search engine developer tools, including the indexing status and the robots.txt tester.
• [ ] Remember that robots.txt is a 'request' to search engines not to crawl, not a 'command' that forces them.