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site.robots-txt-unsupported-rule

WarningSEO auditcrawl

robots.txt uses rules Google does not support: noindex or nofollow lines (retired in 2019, so the pages stay indexable; warning) or crawl-delay (Google ignores it, Bing reads it; info).

What to change

Remove noindex: and nofollow: lines and use a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header on the pages instead. Crawl-delay may stay for Bing and other crawlers; Google sets its crawl rate itself.

The documentation on developers.google.com

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.robots-txt-unsupported-rule

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.robots-txt-unsupported-rule"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.robots-txt-unsupported-rule on the command, or disableRules: ["site.robots-txt-unsupported-rule"] to a tool.

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