Would you like all files on your site to be indexed by search engines? Should pages with privacy policy, or certain errors be brought before the user?
It doesn’t seem to be necessary at all. It’s up to you to determine which pages search engines will crawl and index once they’re on your site. With the robot.txt files, you add to the root directory of your site, you can mark the pages that you do not want to be indexed and direct the behavior of search engine bots. Come discover more with the technical SEO expert team of the Seorative team!
Contents
What is robots.txt?
The robots.txt file is actually a pretty basic, plain text file. This file can be configured as robots.txt allow all or robots.txt disallow all. Such files limit access to the file to prevent a crawler bot from indexing the relevant page. If you do not specify otherwise in the robot.txt file, scanning of all files is allowed. With the configuration you will make, you will ensure that the pages you specify are marked as disallow.
How does robots.txt work?
A robot.txt file is located in the root directory of your site. To get this file to work, you must first locate it. Basically, the job of search engines is to navigate through pages to discover and crawl contents and to index them.
So how does this happen?
When Google spider enters your web page, it looks for the robot.txt file in root before starting the crawling. If there is no robot.txt file in the page source, automatic scanning continues. But if there is a file, the spider first reads this file and follows the orders specified there. Here is information on how the search engine should crawl the site. Pages marked as noindex are also among this information.
Why is robots.txt Important?
The importance of using robot.txt files on your website is as follows:
- It ensures that only one of the duplicate content on your site is indexed. In this way, you will not have pages competing with each other.
- Resources are under control. Remember: the pages to be indexed will waste server resources, bandwidth, or crawlability budget. You can control the resource expenditure process by marking the noindex pages.
- Determining the location of your sitemap is also possible with robot.txt files. With the help of these files, crawlers learn where your sitemap is. This speeds up the crawling process of your site.
How to create a robots.txt file?
You can create a robot.txt file with many text editors you can think of. Among the most commonly used are Notepad, TextEdit, vi, and emacs. To add the file to the site root, the encoding must be in UTF-8 type and the file must be named robot.txt.
- If you want to create a robot.txt file, remember that you can use a wildcard to address all search engines at once.
- You can also configure the coding in a different way to appeal only to certain search engines.
- The first few lines in each block will consist of a user-agent that addresses a specific bot crawling your site. For this, you need to enter the name of this bot in the code. For example, if you want to interfere with Google’s crawling process, you will need to type user-agent: Googlebot.
- The second block in the robot.txt file is for the Disallow function. You use this command when setting the robots.txt format for web pages you don’t want to be crawled. Remember, the rules you specify when creating orders are case-sensitive. For example, if you create a disallow: /file.asp order, you only prevent the https://www.example.com/file.asp page from being crawled. A possible https://www.example.com/FILE.asp page will still be crawled.
- The hashtag (#) you will use when creating the command will mark the beginning of the command.
- The third block in the robot.tx file contains the Allow command. These parts you specified in that block are accessed and crawled by search engine bots. This command is used for pages that are included in the domain you are disallowing, but that you want to allow locally. All pages that are not included in the Disallow area will already be scanned automatically.
- The robot.txt file will also show search engines where the sitemap is. Usually, the URL of the sitemap is: https://example.com/sitemap.xml or http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
How to add a sitemap to robots.txt?
Did you create the robot.txt file and save it to your computer? Super! How you upload this file to your site may vary depending on your site architecture. Here’s what you need to know: you need to add the file to your site’s root directory. For more detailed information, you can contact your hosting company or get professional support from the Seorative team. We are ready for all technical optimization work on your website, including robot.txt file!
Example of robots txt file
Before we finish this detailed guideline, we wanted to show you a few basic robot.txt file examples. Let’s examine:
# Example 1: Block only Googlebot
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
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# Example 2: Block Googlebot and Adsbot
User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
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# Example 3: Block all but AdsBot crawlers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The examples above show the disallow command in basic form.
Too complicated?
Ok, we’ll handle it! Let us manage your visibility and power in the digital world while you take care of your website branding process, your customers, and empowering your services! The Seorative team will call you for robot.txt file optimization, site speed optimization, or any other technical work. Just fill out the contact form below!