I am creating two pages on my site that are very similar but serve different purposes. One is to thank users for leaving a comment and the other is to encourage users to subscribe.
I don't want the duplicate content but I do want the pages to be available. Can I set the sitemap to hide one? Would I do this in the robots.txt file?
The disallow looks like this:
Disallow: /wp-admin
How would I customize to the a specific page like:
Disallow: /thank-you-for-commenting$
in robots.txt
Take a look at last.fm robots.txt file for inspiration.
The dollar sign marks an end. We need that so other pages starting with the same url, for example /thank-you-for-commenting-another-page, will be indexed.
robots.txt files use regular expressions to match pages, so to avoid targeting more pages than you intend, you may need to add a $ to the end of the page name:
Disallow: /thank-you-for-commenting$
If you don't you'll also disallow page /thank-you-for-commenting-on-this-too
You can also add a specific page with extension in robots.txt file. In case of testing, you can specify the test page path to disallow robots from crawling.
For examples:
Disallow: /index_test.php
Disallow: /products/test_product.html
Disallow: /products/
The first one Disallow: /index_test.php will disallow bots from crawling the test page in root folder.
Second Disallow: /products/test_product.html will disallow test_product.html under the folder 'products'.
Finally the last example Disallow: /products/ will disallow the whole folder from crawling.
