I'm trying to setup mobile joomla on a sub domain. I don't want search engines to crawl any of the mobile content. I haven't gone live yet but I think google will still be able to crawl it when I do go live. I think a have a problem with my setup.

The last lines of the robots.txt file at the root of my site says:
Disallow: /iphone/
Disallow: /*&iphone.futuresound.tv

The robot.txt file in the iphone folder says:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /

My CPanel setup is:
Subdomains
(Subdomains.Root Domain) iphone.mywebsite.com
(Document Root) /public_html <-- is this wrong?
(Redirection) not redirected

When I check my robots.txt file in google webmaster tools, it shows the main sites robots.txt file, not the one in my /iphone folder. Please help!

I'd use .htaccess file to have different robots.txt file for each of subdomain, smth like

(use of pda.robots.txt for pda.yoursite.com).

Thanks for your help.
Can you explain in more detail? I'm new at this.
Add that code to the .htaccess file in root or /iphone or both?
Should I make a new file named pda.robots.txt at root? Or iphone.robots.txt?
The code says pda but I'm using iphone only so I'm confused.

Sorry for so many questions. I'm a real amateur at this.

I tried to add the rule you posted to my root .htaccess and I made a new pda.robots.txt file at root, but it brings down my site. Can you help me more please?

Send me text of your .htaccess file.

PS. Just noted that this forum supports windows-style end-of-line code only, and two lines in the code above was merged into a single line. So, check that RewriteCond is started with new line in the .htaccess.

Thank you so much!

I sent you the htaccess in a PM. I understand now about the windows-style end-of-line code. I pasted the code again and now my main site is not broken. How do I check it? Google Webmaster Tools says I'm using robots.txt for iphone.mysite.com. It should see pda.robots.txt.

login418 wrote:


To check just request the following files:
yoursite.com/robots.txt - should contain robots.txt for main domain
yoursite.com/pda.robots.txt - it's file that should be used on subdomain
pda.yoursite.com/robots.txt - here you should get content of pda.robots.txt

And it seems I missed leading slash in the rewrite rule, the correct code is:

.htaccess
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^iphone\.futuresound\.tv$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/robots\.txt$ /pda.robots.txt [L]

iphone.futuresound.tv/robots.txt

 Sorry. If you click on the link above you can see that it is not rewriting to pda.robots.txt
btw mobilejoomla plugin is turned off for now. when turned on it still doesn't rewrite.

Did you try to write last line "slashless"?