I have a WordPress Website. I want robots not to follow the Footer part of the site. Where and what to write in the robot.txt file? Do I need to write anything on the footer.php file? - Please Help
WordPress automagically creates a robots.txt file when it's requested but if you upload a real file that is what the search engines will see. So just create the file, upload and you can control what gets indexed. Bear in mind, however, that the robots.txt file controls complete files and folders - not part of the page. So it can block the bot from accessing the pages you link to in your footer, but it will still know that they exist. If you want them to be ignored completely then you'd be better to make the links nofollow.
Hiding content from search engines only is bad SEO practice and will certainly lead to ranking penalties. It is known as "cloaking". However, if you want to stop certain search engines from indexing a given page, domain, subdomain or folder completely - you can use robots.txt. You can't use that to hide a certain portion of the page only though. You either provide the page to the search engine to be included or not - there is no middle way. As there is no way for the visitors to visit just a portion of that page and not view the remaining areas.
Does using this code in robots.txt makes any sense: Code: User-agent: * Disallow: /*footer.php and also using Code: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the home page above the <div class="Footer"> section. [ The path of my footer file is: /public_html/wp-content/themes/folder/footer.php There is a link in the footer which is encrypted in functions.php and the footer is being called by every page with the code <?php get_footer(); ?> ] **The main reason I want to block search engines from my website is the link in footer which is encrypted from functions.php also there are some unwanted broken links created in footer after using tags in posts.
No, that won't work because footer.php is never requested as a webpage - it is used as a building block to create pages. It sounds like you need to find a new theme for your site - crikey, you might even want to buy one - that doesn't have encrypted code or broken links. If the links are broken then it's probably quite old and therefore unlikely to be mobile friendly - which is essential really.