Canonical & robots meta tag

[I.m.learning]

I really wish sites could just explain in plain English what this tag does.

1- Do I really need this if I only have one page for each topic?

2- If I do use one, can I just put my main index page as the link?

Robots.txt:
Do I need one, or just a robots meta tag?

[Beverleyh]

1. No – you only need them when you have duplicate content, to tell search engines which is the dominant/preferred page.

2. It depends if the page it is on contains content that mainly appears on the home page, otherwise no.

More info: moz.com/learn/5eo/canonicalization

Robots.txt: According to moz.com, noindex meta tags are preferred – moz.com/learn/5eo/robotstxt

(TIP: change the ‘5’ to an ‘s’ before copying the links into a browser)

[I.m.learning]

I’m good on the canonical now; PHP is taking care of that for me.

When I started this website 2 months ago, I really had no clue what I was doing. Now I am spending the day making EXTREME changes. With that comes more research that is truly confusing me.

As far as the robots, my concern is the files my host provides as defaults:

bin, etc, logs, mail, ssl, tmp, & access-logs

I truly don’t know what [ALL] these files are for and don’t use them for my own content. But, I don’t know if I should disallow them. I don’t even know if robots access these files.

As I said, my content is limited, but when I start adding DBs and cookies, this may be important.

I also have public_ftp and public_html…seems obvious NOT to block these ones.

[Beverleyh]

No need to worry about the folders above/outside of your public_html one (the main/root folder where your website lives). They aren’t publicly accessible (or shouldn’t be) – your web host will have taken care of security on those.

[I.m.learning]

My post was discarded:

My issue was seeing Yahoo.com disallow includes and bin.

I am using PHP for includes and know I have a bin folder. That is why I asked.

I talked to name.com and they mentioned daily monitoring for security threats, especially when it comes to DBs.

No one can access the DB outside the CPanel, but have heard about SQL injections. Right now, I do not have any forms, or databases, but know I should be using something like
htmlspecialchars.

This is a long way off, but figured, since I am going to be spending the next few days cleaning my code; it gives an opportunity for people to post their opinions on the matter.

[Ilan Firsov]

Right now, I do not have any forms, or databases, but know I should be using something like htmlspecialchars.

You should be using prepared statements rather than escape-voodoo

[I.m.learning]

@Ilan Firsov
Yeah, I was going to look at that later. I saw a video about SQL injection while I was doing some research for UTF-8. The guys at computerphile mentioned something about that.

My PHP knowledge is a LOT rusty. But was going to look at that or JS for changing content ion some of my pages.

Thank you for reminding me!

[I.m.learning]

nothing

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