Restricting crawler activity to certain directories with robots.txt

Posted by neimad on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by neimad
Published on 2011-11-05T13:29:00Z Indexed on 2011/11/19 10:16 UTC
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ruby-on-rails

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robots.txt

I would like to use robots.txt to prevent indexing of some parts of my website. I want search engines to index only the / directory and not search inside my controllers.

In my robots.txt, I have this:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /compagnies/
Disallow: /floors/
Disallow: /spaces/
Disallow: /buildings/
Disallow: /users/
Disallow: /

I put this file in /mysite/public. I tested the file with a robots.txt validator and got no errors.

However, Google always returns the result of my site. For testing, I added Disallow: /, but again, Google indexed all pages.

floors, spaces, buildings, etc. are not physical directories. Is this a bug? How can I work around it?

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