A robots.txt file is responsible for providing instructions to search engines on how they can crawl your website. The file needs to be located in the website root directory. The website is example.com/robots.txt. Keep reading on what is robot txt file in seo.
The file consists of a set of Allow and Disallow directives that tell search engines which sections of the website they can crawl and which ones they cannot. It is possible to give general instructions to all bots or to target a particular one using a user-agent directive, which can prevent a particular bot from accessing a section of the website.
Finally, it is possible (and recommended) to add a sitemap declaration to the end of robots.txt, telling search engines the URL where they can find the XML sitemap. Understand first what is robots txt.
User agents are the way search engine robots identify themselves when accessing the website. By placing a user-agent directive in robots.txt you can tell the different robots which pages of the website they can or cannot access. For example, you could block Google from accessing a section of your website using the Google-bot user-agent.
It is important to note that if you address different user agents in your robots.txt, these user agents will ignore the rest of the instructions that appear in the file, obeying only those that are addressed to them directly. One needs to know how to check robots txt.
The way you have to indicate to robots whether or not they can access a section of the web is through allow and disallow directives, the latter being the most common.
The disallow directive happens to be used to tell search engines that they cannot access the section of the website. And this is what is robot txt in seo. Thus, once disallow is placed in the file, the assigned user agents will stop crawling that part of the web page.
By blocking search engines from accessing certain parts of the website, you can prevent them from wasting time and resources crawling sections that have no value to us, such as shopping carts, login or user account pages, or private sections.
All robots begin their crawl by accessing the robots.txt file to find out which pages on the website they are allowed to access. Therefore, it is advisable to include an XML sitemap declaration at the end of the file to tell the robots where your sitemap is located.
If your website has more than one sitemap, it is possible to indicate where each one is located. However, it is more advisable to add the URL to the sitemap index, if you have one. In any case, declaring the sitemap is not mandatory.
The Crawl-delay directive is used to tell the different robots how much time should pass between each crawling action they perform.
This directive is no longer used by Google, since it does not adapt to each website so as not to make a high number of requests that could saturate the server on which it is hosted. However, other search engines, such as Bing or Yandex, continue to use this directive.
Robots.txt allows you to have greater control over the way search engines crawl your website, telling them which sections they can and cannot access.
Every website is completely different, so there is no one robots.txt file that fits every website.
A few sections you might wish to block include:
By blocking access to pages of no interest or pages with duplicate or thin content, such as faceted navigation in an e-commerce, you can prevent the Google bot from wasting crawl budget and focus on those pages that interest us.
It should be noted that the robots.txt file only prevents the URL from being crawled. This doesn’t mean that search engines cannot guide it. If the URL has links, internal or external, pointing to it, it could be indexed. Also, placing a no-index tag in the header would not prevent indexing, since the robot will never access the URL and will not read this directive. Get the details of how to create robots txt in detail.
Finally, after uploading your new robots.txt file, you can use Google's robots.txt tester to check which directives are blocking Google-bot from accessing your website's content. If you prefer, other tools, such as Screaming Frog, allow you to use a custom robots.txt to perform the crawl, so you can check the correct implementation of the directives before uploading it to production.
Creation Infoways team of experts can advise you on the creation and configuration of your robots.txt file and many other aspects of technical SEO. Creation Infoways experts will evaluate your website to define the most appropriate rules, ensuring that search engines crawl only relevant content, thus improving the visibility and performance of your site.
In addition, Creation Infoways happens to carry out continuous monitoring and strategic adjustments to keep your website up to date, protecting your sensitive content and optimizing your online presence. Contact with Creation Infoways now!
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