Second, it gets placed in the root folder of the website, e.g. If the web crawler doesn’t find a robots.txt, or the file does not contain directives that disallow the search bots’ activity, the crawler will continue to spider the entire site as usual.įor a robots.txt file to be findable and readable by search bots, a robots.txt is formatted in a very particular way.įirst, it is a text file with no HTML markup code (hence the. If it finds the robots.txt, the crawler will read it first before continuing with its crawl of the site. This is why a search crawler will look for a robots.txt file as soon as it arrives at a website. It tells search bots where (and where not) they should crawl. (I’ll be showing you exactly how to do that later in this post) How (Exactly) Does a Robots.txt Work?Īs I already shared, a robots.txt file acts as an instructional manual for search engine robots. You can add a simple line of text to your robots.txt file, and search engines get blocked from accessing these multimedia files. The trouble is, meta directives don’t work well for multimedia resources, like PDFs and Word docs. It’s best practice to use the “no-index” meta directive to stop individual pages from getting indexed. Simply put, search engines are using up the time allotted to crawl your content on your website’s deadweight pages.īy blocking low utility URLs with robots.txt, search engine robots can spend more of their crawl budget on the pages that matter most. If you’re having a hard time getting all of your pages indexed in search engines, you might have a crawl budget problem. If this were the case, you could use robots.txt to block these pages from search engine crawlers. Or you may have website login pages you don’t want showing up in SERPs. Sometimes you have pages on your site that you don’t want indexing.įor example, you might be developing a new website on a staging environment that you want to be sure is hidden from users until launch. That’s because Google can usually find and index all of the essential pages on a site.Īnd, they’ll automatically NOT index duplicate content or pages that are unimportant.īut still, there’s no good reason not to have a robots.txt file – so I recommend you have one.Ī robots.txt gives you greater control over what search engines can and can’t crawl on your website, and that’s helpful for several reasons: Allows Non-Public Pages to be Blocked from Search Engines Having a robots.txt file isn’t critical for a lot of websites, especially tiny ones. Google tends to obey the instructions in a robots.txt file. Thankfully, Google isn’t one of those search engines. Should they wish, search engines can choose to ignore your robots.txt file. If there are no directives – or no robots.txt file – search engines will crawl the entire website, private pages, and all.Īlthough most search engines are obedient, it’s important to note that abiding by robots.txt directives is optional. These instructions are known as directives. The robots.txt gets checked regularly by every major search engine (including Google, Bing, and Yahoo) for instructions about how they should crawl the website. That said, robots.txt is used primarily as a “code of conduct” to control the activity of search engine robots (AKA web crawlers). It informs bots of all types, which sections of a site they should (and should not) crawl. In simple terms, a robots.txt file is an instructional manual for web robots. What is a Robots.txt file? And, Why You Need One How to audit your robots.txt for errors.Specifically, I’ll show you how to use robots exclusion protocols to block bots from particular pages, increase crawl frequency, optimize crawl budget, and ultimately get more of the right page’s ranking in SERPs. Today you’re going to learn how to create one of the most critical files for a website’s SEO:
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