A Robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website to index and which ones to ignore.You can use a robots.txt file to manage how these web robots interact with your website. For example, you might want all of the pages on your website crawled so that the search engine can index your content. Or, you might want only a few of the pages on your website crawled because you don’t want all of the information on your website to be publicly available. A robots.txt file lives at the root of your website (i.e.www.example.com/robots.txt). When a web robot visits your website, it will first check for a robots.txt file and then read the instructions in that file to decide which pages on your website to crawl and which not to.
In simple terms, think of it like a Map legend that crawlers like Google or Bing use to tell them where they can and can not crawl.
What is the purpose of a Robots.txt file?
These robots or crawlers are typically used by search engines to index websites, but can also be used for other purposes such as website maintenance or data collection by tools like AHREFs. The robots.txt file tells the crawlers which pages they are allowed to index and which they should ignore. This can be useful if there are certain pages on your website that you do not want to be indexed, such as ones that contain sensitive information. The robots.txt file can also be used to help manage server load by telling robots when they should visit your website and how often they should crawl it. For smaller sites, this is rarely a problem, but on larger sites where crawls of your site can use significant resources on your server, this can be very important to consider for SEO. In general, the robots.txt file is a helpful tool for managing how bots, agents or crawlers interact with your website.
How do we use a Robots.txt file for SEO?
When a robots.txt file exists on a website, web robots (also known as robots, crawlers, and spiders) check the robots.txt file before crawling any other files on the website. If the robots.txt file contains instructions that tell the robot not to crawl certain files or directories, the robot obeys those instructions. For example, if you have a “disallow” directive in your robots.txt file that tells Google not to crawl your blog directory, Google won’t crawl any files in that directory.
You can use a robots.txt file to:
- Block all web robots from all files on your website
- Block certain web robots/agents from certain files or directories
- Allow certain web robots to crawl your website
- Tell web robots when they can crawl your website
- Tell web robots how often they should crawl your website
There are three major types of issues I see with robots.txt files that affect SEO:
1) Wildcard handling isn’t always perfect – there’s a chance that parts will get blocked off when they shouldn’t, or directives can even conflict one another due to changes made by developers without your knowledge;
2). The inclusion/usage of directives outside of what is standard and commonly used on the web (web standard), which may cause crawlers confusion as well lead them into errors processing information ending up being indexed thus costing you valuable time spent fixing these problems
3); Sometimes harmless mistakes become problematic if done repetitively over long periods
A robots.txt file is a simple way to control which parts of your site are indexed by search engines, and can be used to help prevent duplicate content issues. In conclusion, robots.txt files can be a helpful way to control how your site is indexed, but they’re not perfect. Be sure to monitor your site’s performance in search engines to ensure that the robots.txt file is doing what you want it to.