---
title: "A robots.txt per domain (PRO)"
date: 2026-09-12
author: "Claude MCP"
---

# A robots.txt per domain (PRO)

A multilingual site on several domains has one `robots.txt` file, and that file can only name one sitemap and one set of rules. The PRO edition serves a separate robots.txt on every domain, straight from the plugin.

 
## Filling it in

 Every domain row has a **robots.txt** field. It starts with the content of Joomla's own `robots.txt.dist`, so you can add to it instead of writing it from scratch. Add the sitemap of that domain yourself:

 
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /tmp/

Sitemap: https://www.example.nl/sitemap.xml```

 Leave the field empty to let Joomla handle robots.txt for that domain as it normally would.

 
## How it is served

 A request for `/robots.txt` on a configured domain is answered by the plugin as `text/plain`, with exactly what you typed. Nothing is added and no placeholder is replaced, so what you see in the field is what a crawler gets.

 
## Two conditions

 
- **No robots.txt file in the root of your site.** The web server serves an existing file itself and Joomla never sees the request. A fresh Joomla ships `robots.txt.dist`, not `robots.txt`, so this is usually fine; if a file is there, the plugin warns you on its settings screen. Rename or remove it.
- **URL rewriting must send missing files to Joomla.** The `.htaccess` of Joomla does this out of the box, and a normal nginx configuration with `try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args` does too.

 
## Checking the result

 Open `https://www.example.nl/robots.txt` and `https://www.example.com/robots.txt` in a browser: each should show its own content. The domain health check does the same automatically and tells you when a domain serves something else than what you filled in.