Gary Illyes From Google Quizzes SEOs

Jul 6, 2020 - 7:47 am 1 by

googlebot

Google's Gary Illyes posted a pop quiz for SEOs the other day on Twitter. The responses of the poll showed that SEOs are split on the answer of how Google would handle a contradictory robots.txt file directive.

Gary asked "how will this affect crawling:"

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /

He said try not to use a tool when answering.

The results after almost 2,500 responses to the poll were that 52% said this will lead to everything being disallowed and 48% said it will lead to everything being allowed.

Here are the results:

Former Googler, Pedro Dias said order matters but current Googler showed some notes that may say otherwise:

Then Pedro showed the tool:

The answer should be clear cut?

Honestly, if any SEO would see this in a robots.txt - they would just make sure to clean it up and make sure the directives were clear. But it was a fun poll to see.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Search Engine Optimization

Google AI Mode Reporting Coming To Search Console

May 23, 2025 - 6:50 pm
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 23, 2025

May 23, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Google I/O, Marketing Live, AI Mode, AI Overviews, AI Ads, Search Volatility & More

May 23, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google

Google AI Mode Tracking Referrer Issue A Bug

May 23, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Maps

Spike In Google Business Profiles Name Changes?

May 23, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense Anchor Ad Positions Setting

May 23, 2025 - 7:31 am
Previous Story: Google: Spam Reports Not Used For Manual Actions