Unknowingly restricting some directories

[estaquieto]

Hi, for the longest time I have been restricting some important directories on my site from being crawled. My mistake was simple (and superiorly dumb). I left out the slash (/) after the name of the directory.

Example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /b

I found out that by not putting a slash after the b, I am restricting all directories starting with that letter! ARgh!

Now that I have corrected it, will it still be possible to get Google et al to include the once restricted directories? How long should that take? I am now linking heavily to the pages in question and they are included in my sitemap. Please tell me what other things I can do. Thanks!

[Dijkgraaf]

Your aren't only disallowing any directories starting with b, but everything starting with b.

See also this thread [webmasterworld.com] about why it is sometimes not a good idea to have a trailing slash for disallowing directories.

I'd suggest making your directory names more meaningfull and distinct from any other pages/resources, so your disallow can refer only to those things you want to disallow.

Just make the changes to your robots.txt and naming conventions and they will get indexed eventually.