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You may know about search engine crawlers and how they index your website’s pages, allowing them to rank in SERPs. Well, what if you could tell them exactly how to crawl your site? Robots.txt can help you do just that. What’s more, you can use robots.txt files to boost your SEO efforts. In this blog, we explain what robots.txt is, how it works, and how it helps website owners. Read on!
What Is A Robots.txt File?
Robots.txt is a plain text file that carries a set of guidelines or website preferences for web crawler bots, letting them know which pages they should crawl and which ones they can ignore. It tells these bots where they’re ‘allowed’ and where they’re not.
What exactly is a ‘bot’ in this context? A bot is an autonomous program on the internet or another network that can interact with websites, applications, and systems. Web crawler bots are only one type of bot. Using robots.txt files allows you to use these bots to control website traffic and indexing.
How Does A Robots.txt File Work?
A robots.txt file should be added to the root directory of a website. It uses something called the “Robots Exclusion Protocol,” which tells search engine bots which pages they can crawl and which ones they can’t. This prevents your site from getting overloaded with requests by demanding bots.
Whenever a search engine crawler bot accesses a website, it checks its robots.txt file for directives. Good crawler bots will usually comply with the instructions in the robots.txt file to crawl the website. Robots.txt files usually include a “User-agent” followed by other directives.
User-agent
The user agent refers to the crawler bot that the instructions pertain to. Common User-agents are Googlebot (Google) and Bingbot (Bing). An asterisk (*) is a wildcard used to refer to all bots.
Allow
Part of Yelp’s robots.txt file
The ‘allow’ directive gives user-agents permissions to crawl a particular URL. You would usually use a robots.txt in this way to allow bots to crawl certain pages or subdirectories that belong to an otherwise disallowed directory.
Disallow
Reddit’s robots.txt file
The “disallow” directive tells the user agent not to crawl or index a URL. The above robots.txt is blocking all crawler bots from crawling or indexing any page on the website. However, disallowing a bot from crawling a page doesn’t always prevent it from being indexed.
The “disallow” directive is a suggestion and not a legally binding rule. Some bots may choose to ignore all or parts of your robots.txt instructions. Bots may still be able to access your site’s disallowed pages by following external links.
How Can Robots.txt Help Your Website?
So, how does explaining robots.txt help website owners? Implementing robots.txt isn’t a necessity for all websites, but it can be quite useful to those that do need it.
Duplicate Content Management
You can use robots.txt files to prevent search engine bots from crawling pages with duplicate content, which can positively impact the website’s SEO and improve overall search engine rankings.
Block Non-Public Pages
You can disallow bots from crawling pages not meant for the public eye. These include backend files, admin pages, and pages with low-quality or incomplete content.
Crawl Budget Optimization
If your site doesn’t have a robots.txt file or if it doesn’t include any directives, crawler bots will usually crawl your entire website, even irrelevant pages like cart and filter pages, and waste your site’s crawl budget. Using robots.txt files to block low-value pages ensures that crawler bots index only the pages that can help your website rank.
Direction Towards Sitemaps
Part of last.fm’s robots.txt file
The robots.txt file guides bots towards your XML sitemap, which helps them crawl your site’s most important pages and quickly index new content. This improves your site’s visibility in SERPs.
Improving SERP Rankings
Robots.txt files allow you to control how your site is indexed and appears in search results. By preventing low-quality pages from being crawled, robots.txt allows you to focus your crawl budget on important pages and improve your SERP rankings.
Protecting Sensitive Data and Resources
Parts of your website, like login pages, may contain data that you want to keep confidential. This includes files and data meant for internal use only. You can use robots.txt files to disallow bots from crawling sensitive and private pages, images, and other resources.
Avoiding Unwanted Bots
Part of Wikipedia’s robots.txt file that deters unwanted bots
Some bots can greatly increase server load. These include bots that are designed to copy entire websites, scrape content, or harvest content for training AI models. Disallowing non-essential bits reduces server load and reduces your website’s load time.
Optimizing Site Performance
Preventing unwanted bots from overloading your server with requests, limiting the bots that can access your site, and not crawling unnecessary pages improves your website performance, reduces load times, and helps it run smoothly.
Concluding Thoughts
Robots.txt gives you control over how your website appears in search engine results. This can help you optimize your website for SEO by reducing server load and making the most out of your crawl budget.
While robots.txt can be handy, remember that it only blocks pages from getting crawled, not indexed. To block pages from getting indexed, we recommend using noindex tags or protecting them with a password. Similarly, duplicate content can be optimized for SEO by adding canonical tags.
Robots.txt can be a powerful SEO tool—as long as you use it right. However, syntax errors and incorrect directives can prevent important pages from being crawled or indexed on time. A reputed SEO agency like Apex Infotech can help you implement the best practices to harness the power of robots.txt.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can bots ignore robots.txt directives?
Yes, some web crawler bots may ignore robots.txt directives and crawl forbidden pages. Robots.txt files inform bots of the optional directives but cannot enforce them.
Where is the robots.txt file kept?
The robots.txt file is placed within the root directory of a website. You can usually check the robots.txt of any website by adding /robots.txt after the homepage URL.
Can I block AI bots from my websites?
Yes, you can use directives in your website’s robots.txt file to disallow AI bots from crawling your site.
What is the robots.txt directive for preventing all bots from crawling your site?
The robots.txt directive to prevent all bots from crawling a site is:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This combination tells all web crawlers that they are not allowed to access any part of the site. The (*) sign specifies that the rule applies to all web crawlers, while (/) tells bots not to crawl the site’s root directory or any other pages.
What is the difference between robots.txt and meta robots tags?
Robots.txt applies to the entire website, while meta robots tags apply to individual pages. While robots.txt tells bots which pages to crawl and which to ignore, meta robots tags provide page-specific instructions for indexing and link following.
