In short, it won’t matter but blocking it might save up some crawl budget.
If you are reviewing your site crawl logs or indexing reports, you might see URLs like:
/cdn-cgi/email-protection
This is a feature from Cloudflare that helps protect email addresses from being harvested by bots. Many site owners wonder if they should block this URL path using robots.txt and whether it has any SEO impact.
Do You Need to Block /cdn-cgi/email-protection?
- No, you don’t need to block it.
- This URL is generated by Cloudflare and is not part of your main website content.
- Search engines usually ignore it on their own.
Will It Affect SEO if You Block It?
- Blocking has no negative SEO impact.
- These URLs don’t provide content value and don’t need to be indexed.
- If they appear in Google Search Console, it’s just because bots discovered the links while crawling.
Recommended Action
- You can safely leave it as is.
- If you want cleaner crawl reports, you can add this line in your robots.txt:
Disallow: /cdn-cgi/
- This prevents unnecessary crawl requests but does not harm your rankings.
Key Takeaway
Blocking /cdn-cgi/email-protection in robots.txt is optional. It does not affect SEO performance because search engines do not consider this URL as meaningful content. Adding the block can make your crawl reports tidier, but leaving it open is also fine.
