As a website owner or an SEO professional, you may have come across the term "Robots.txt" in your SEO research.
Robots.txt is a text file that is part of the standard for Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). This is primarily used to prevent your website from becoming overloaded with requests.
In this article, we'll explore what robots.txt is, how it works in SEO, and how to use it effectively.
What is Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file that tells web robots (also known as crawlers or spiders) which pages of your website should not be crawled or indexed.
The file is located in the root directory of your website, and its purpose is to give instructions to web robots about which parts of your site to exclude from search engines.
For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you do not want the search engines to access your thank you page, that page will not appear in search engine results and web users will not be able to find it.
How Robots.txt Work in SEO
Web robots crawl websites to index their pages and add them to search engines' databases. If you don't want certain pages of your website to be indexed, you can use robots.txt to instruct the web robots to skip those pages.
It is important to note that robots.txt does not guarantee that search engines will not index pages on your website. Some web robots may ignore robots.txt instructions, and some search engines may still index pages that are excluded from robots.txt.
So, using robots.txt to exclude pages from search engines does not necessarily mean that those pages will not be accessible to users. People can still access those pages if they have a direct link to them or if they navigate to them through your website's navigation.
A good bot will try to access the robots.txt file prior to looking at every other page on a domain and will do so in accordance with the instructions, such as a web crawler or a news feed bot. Some bots will either overlook the robots.txt file or process it to identify web pages that are outlawed.
Robots.txt gives you greater control over search engine movement on your website - there are some situations where it can be very helpful :
- Preserve your crawl budget
- Prevents duplicate content crawling
- Provide specific bots with crawling instructions
- Pass link equity or link juice to right pages
- Prevents indexing of unnecessary files
As you execute your SEO tips checklist, you want search engines to recognise the improvements. If your site crawling rate is slow, verification of your improved site may be delayed. Robots.txt can help keep your site organized and efficient and help you push your site to the top of search engine result pages.
Structure of Robots.txt
To use robots.txt effectively, you need to understand the syntax and structure of the file.
Our free Robot.txt Generator tool can help you to create and use it in your website.
The basic structure of the file includes the following elements: User-agent The "User-agent:" section specifies which robot to be blocked.
However, by using the "*" character, you dictate that the instructions below apply to all robots.
Disallow
The “Disallow:” tag specifies the pages or directories that the web robots should not crawl.
The "/" symbol indicates the "root" of a website's hierarchy, or the page from which all other pages extend up, so it includes the homepage as well as all pages linked from it. Search engine bots are unable to crawl the website with this command.
Using "/" command will prevent search engines from crawling your site at all.
Allow
The “Allow:” tag specifies the pages or directories that the web robots are allowed to crawl (this is not always necessary since web robots usually crawl all pages by default).
Crawl Delay
Crawl Delay is an unofficial directive that is used to delay crawling. Google does not recognise this command, but other search engines do. For Google, you can change the crawl frequency using Google Search Console.
Sitemap
The sitemap directive tells search engines where to find your XML sitemap. If you want to submit your XML sitemaps to each search engine, you can do so through their webmaster tools.
We recommend you to do so because webmaster tools will provide you with a wealth of information about your site. If you don't want to do that, adding a sitemap line to your robots.txt file is an immediate solution.
Robots.txt : Best Practices
If you are unfamiliar with the robots.txt file or are unsure whether your site even has one, you can perform a quick check to see. To check, go to your site's root domain and then add /robots.txt to the end of the URL. For example, www.examplesite.com/robots.txt
If nothing appears, your site does not have a robots.txt file. Now is the ideal time to dive in and try your hand at making one for your website.
Here are some best practices to effectively use robots.txt :
- Ensure that all important pages are crawlable, and that content that will not provide genuine value if found in search is blocked.
- Make sure the file is located in the root directory of your website.
- Use the correct syntax and structure to give clear instructions to web robots.
- Test your robots.txt file using Google's robots.txt tester
- Regularly review and update your robots.txt file to ensure that it's up-to-date and reflects changes to your website's structure.
- Do not use it to hide private user information.
- Ensure to include your Sitemap.
- The file must be named "robots.txt" (no alternatives are allowed).
If your site has subdomains, you must have a robots.txt file on each subdomain as well as the main root domain.
By properly configuring your robots.txt file, you can help bots in carefully spending their crawl budgets and ensuring that they aren't wasting their time and resources crawling pages that don't need to be crawled.
Robots.txt : Common Mistakes
A minor mistake in any directive in the Robots.txt file can result in poor crawlability, which has a very bad impact on your site SEO.
Here are some common errors that people make when creating robots.txt file :
- Not putting the file in the root directory
- Using NoIndex directive in robots.txt
- Not placing sitemap location
- Blocking CSS and JS files
- Excessive use of trailing slash(/)
- Incorrect use of wildcards(*,$)
- Not having dedicate file for each subdomains
A small mistake in robots.txt can seriously harm your overall SEO performance. So you should take extreme care to avoid making any mistakes in the file for your site.
FAQs
Q. How do I know if a site has a robots.txt file?
Enter the website with the following extension into your browser to find your domain's robots.txt file: www.domain.com/robots.txt.
Many CMS platforms, such as WordPress, create these files automatically and allow you to edit them from the backend. You don’t need to work from scratch.
Q. What are the Differences between Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml?
There are various differences between robots.txt and sitemap.xml. They are different in objective, URL, how they are created, how search engine bots treat and use them, and so on.
Robots.txt file guides search engine robots on how to navigate a website and how not to do so.
Sitemap.xml is an XML file that contains all of a website's URLs and is used to show bots how many useful URLs are accessible on the website.
Q. Do all web robots respect robots.txt?
No, some web robots may ignore robots.txt instructions. However, most reputable web robots will follow the instructions specified in the file.
Q. Can I use robots.txt to hide content from users?
No, robots.txt is not designed to hide content from users. Its purpose is to instruct web robots which pages to exclude from search engine indexes.
Q. Can I use robots.txt to block search engines from indexing my entire website?
Yes, you can use robots.txt to block search engines from indexing your entire website by specifying the root directory (e.g., "Disallow: /").
Final Thoughts
So you have learned how to correctly create your robots.txt file, which allows you to be clever with SEO efforts and provide a better experience to Google bots as well as your site audience.
Remember that setting up your robots.txt file does not have to take a lot of time and effort. It's a one-time setup after which you can make minor tweaks to shape up your site in the long run.
