In technical SEO, first comes the robot.txt file which is an important technique for SEO. Robot.txt file is a txt file that tells which page to crawl. Not here. You can use robots.txt file to manage how these web robots interact with your website. For example, you may want to crawl all the pages of your website so that search engines can index your content. Or, you may want to crawl only some pages of your website because you do not want all the information of your website to be publicly available. Let’s see What is Robot.txt & why it Matter in SEO
What is Robot.txt
robot.txt file which tells Google’s crawler which page should not be crawled. If there is an important page in your website and you want the crawler not to crawl this page or if you want the crawler to crawl your page, then you can use this robot.txt file. This is called robot.txt file
How does it work?
Before a search engine crawls your website, it first looks at your robot.txt file to determine which pages to crawl. You can use the robot.txt file to tell them which ones not to crawl. Search engines have a limited “crawl budget” and can only crawl a certain number of pages per day,
so you want to give them the best chance of finding your pages quickly by blocking all irrelevant URLs.
Which pages not to crawl:
Duplicate or broken pages on your website
Internal search results pages
Certain areas of your website or the entire domain
Certain files on your website, such as images and PDFs
Login pages
Staging of the website for developers
Your XML sitemap
How to create a robots.txt file
If you do not have a robot.txt file and you do not know how to create it then you have to follow this step, let’s see
Step 1: Understand the Syntax of robots.txt
The robots.txt file uses two primary directives:
- User-agent: Specifies which bots the rule applies to.
- Disallow/Allow: Specifies which parts of the website can or cannot be crawled.
Example:
User-agent: * # Applies to all bots
Disallow: /private/ # Disallows the /private/ directory
Allow: /public/ # Allows the /public/ directory
Step 2: Create the File
1. First, install a text editor on your laptop or PC such as Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac), or a code editor.
2. Write the directives based on your website’s crawling preferences.
Step 3: Example Configurations
Block All Bots from the Entire Website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow All Bots to Crawl Everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Block Bots from Specific Directories:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/
Allow Specific Bots:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Step 4: Save the File
- Save the file as
robots.txt. - Ensure it is in plain text format.
Step 5: Upload to Your Website
Place the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website. For example:
https://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txtWhat is the purpose of a Robots.txt file?
These robots.txt files are commonly used to index a website but they can also be used for other purposes such as website maintenance or data collection by tools like AHREF. The robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages they are allowed to index and which pages they are not allowed to index. It will be used only when there are pages on your website that you do not want to be crawled. If your website is related to finance, then in that case the use of robots.txt file becomes important.
Robots.txt generator
https://smallseotools.com/robots-txt-generator
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