Robots.txt - What is the proper format for a Crawl Delay for multiple user agents?

Discussion in 'robots.txt' started by sam223, Jun 29, 2013.

  1. #1
    Below is a sample robots.txt file for multiple user agents with multiple crawl delays, one for each user agent. The Crawl-delay values are for illustration purposes and will be different in a real robots.txt file.

    I have searched all over the web for proper answers but could not find one. There are too many mixed suggestions and I do not know which is the correct / proper method.

    Questions:
    (1) Can each user agent have it's own crawl-delay? (I assume yes)
    (2) Where do you put the crawl-delay line for each user agent, before or after the Allow / Dissallow line?
    (3) Does there have to be a blank like between each user agent group?
    (4) If I want to set all of the user agents to have crawl delay of 10 seconds, would the code at the bottom be correct?

    References:
    http://www.seopt.com/2013/01/robots-text-file/
    http://help.yandex.com/webmaster/?id=1113851#1113858

    Essentially, I am looking to find out how the final robots.txt file should look using the values in the sample below.

    Thanks in advance.

    # Allow only major search spiders
    User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 11

    User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 12

    User-agent: Adsbot-Google
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 13

    User-agent: Googlebot-Image
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 14

    User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 15

    User-agent: MSNBot
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 16

    User-agent: bingbot
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 17

    User-agent: Slurp
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 18

    User-agent: Yahoo! Slurp
    Disallow:
    Crawl-delay: 19

    # Block all other spiders
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

    # Block Directories for all spiders
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /ads/
    Disallow: /cgi-bin/
    Disallow: /scripts/

    (4) If I want to set all of the user agents to have crawl delay of 10 seconds, would the following be correct?

    # Allow only major search spiders
    User-agent: *
    Crawl-delay: 10

    User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Adsbot-Google
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Googlebot-Image
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
    Disallow:

    User-agent: MSNBot
    Disallow:

    User-agent: bingbot
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Slurp
    Disallow:

    User-agent: Yahoo! Slurp
    Disallow:

    # Block all other spiders
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

    # Block Directories for all spiders
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /ads/
    Disallow: /cgi-bin/
    Disallow: /scripts/
     
    sam223, Jun 29, 2013 IP