I want the user profiles on my website to get indexed in Google. I know it might attract a lot of spam but we can handle that, although getting user profiles indexed in Google is more important for us. So is there a way to do this? I checked the old topics on meta and they suggested to edit robot.txt. Is the answer still the same? And if the yes, then how to edit the robot.txt?

User profiles are disallowed as the version which is seen by the crawler contains no useful information. It’s not a question of whether the server can handle it or “take the hit”, it’s the tens of thousands of effectively empty pages which will waste the crawl time allocated to your site by the search engines.

You are absolutely right, for most websites your answer makes absolute sense. But, my use case is slightly different and that’s why I wanted to know how to index user profiles. Even if tons of useless pages (user profiles) gets indexed, then also that’s what I need for my use case. If there’s a way to achieve it then, please let me know. :slight_smile:

I am also want to index the Categories and Tags. Is there a way to edit the robots.txt?

@Stephen, now that we can “play” with robot.txt here → /admin/customize/robots do you guys advise to allow those two → Disallow: /tags - Disallow: /tags/ ?

We do not advise messing with this at all.

Old one, but there is one fast trick: send a gmail where is link to user category, tags etc. and let users — like admins and mods — open those links. Then googlebot doesn’t follow robots.txt anymore and will index those. Rest is, as usual, matter of Google will it follow deeper or forget. This topic, and quite many similar ones, gives an image here where robots.txt would a strict rule. No it is not. It is just a guideline, nothing else. And spam/steeling fear is valid, but trashy bots don’t care what is in robots.txt. If something is reachable they will go there.

How to edit robot.txt for indexing user profiles?

Product Support

Stephen (Stephen) April 7, 2019, 4:53am 5

Search meta, the reasons this is disabled is well documented.

Topic		Replies	Views
Excluding user profiles in robots.txt (or allow edit of file) Feature	4	2636	May 24, 2014
Indexing User Profiles Product Support	2	198	September 4, 2025
Pages listed in the robots.txt are crawled and indexed by Google Product Support	18	3632	July 30, 2019
Generic rules in "robots.txt" not picked up by Googlebot Product Support	5	1130	March 3, 2022
Why there are lots of Disallow rule in robots.txt? Product Support	34	5021	December 22, 2020

How to edit robot.txt for indexing user profiles?

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