The topic that we are going to discuss today is one of the most crucial parts when it comes to technical SEO. This can make your site or break it completely if you have implemented it in the wrong way. It is important for marketers to understand what is robots.txt and the benefits of using it for website and SEO purposes.
Robots.txt allows us to command the way you wish to make your website accessible to search engines. It is one of the most powerful features that marketers can use in directing the search engine for which are the pages that need to be crawled and the pages that have to be ignored.
It is like a gate pass between your website and the search engine. And you have complete authority whether you have to allow search engines to index your web pages or not.
Every search engine has its own search crawlers that decipher the code from robots.txt. In this guide, you will be learning all about robots.txt and the benefits of using them.
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What are robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text-based file that allows you to create a set of directives that makes the search engine understand all about your website. This is directly beneficial to SEO when you want some of the sections of your website to be ignored and the other sections to be prioritized. The robots.txt file allows you to control search engine crawlers from any platform as per your requirement.
It is like devising complete guidelines that the search engine needs to follow when they crawl your website. It is completely ethical in nature and you can even block search crawlers from spam search engines.
The file may look very small and plain, it has the complete power to make your website go anonymous on the web. You should be careful when you are optimizing the robots.txt file for your website.
What do robots.txt look like?
There are two major functions that make robots.txt get diversified. The first is the ‘allow directive’ that is used on the website and the second is the ‘disallow directive’.
Allow directive
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow directive
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If you notice from the above two sets of instructions, the only difference is the ‘/’ used for the robots.txt script. With just one addition of character, your entire website depends on the will. The search engine will understand whether it has to access your website or not. This is the reason why we keep on telling web developers and SEO professionals to use the robots.txt script wisely and cross-check multiple times.
Benefits of using robots.txt for website
There are many advantages of using robots.txt for websites, in this section we are going to shortlist some of the major benefits that will resolve your queries in implementation.
1. Helps in accessing your website
The robots.txt is the only file that acts like a gateway for your website to appear on the search engine. When you have used scripts to write protocols in developing the robots.txt file, you will easily notice that the website will be directly displayed on the search engine.
Every search engine crawler has its own protocol for accessing your website. You need to follow the steps in writing the script for the robots.txt file so that the content from your website is discovered by the search engine.
2. Discourage the search engine from accessing your private files
If there are any files that have been hosted on the web server, you have the complete authority to dictate rules for search engines not to access those files. It can be the administrative files, login pages, or any financial documents stored on the server. As the files can be confidential for your business or you do not wish every user to access that content on the search engine. This is the reason marketers and website owners use robots.txt files to discourage the search engine from accessing them.
3. Benefits in maintaining the reputation of your website
When the web pages get indexed on a search engine that is not pertinent for your end-user, it creates a negative effect for your target audience. This is the reason the robots.txt file is implemented so that you can direct them to index pages that are relevant to users and ignore that is not useful to them.
4. It is used when your website is under construction
The robots.txt is popularly used when your website is getting developed. As you do not wish to get the web pages indexed that are not relevant for the end-user or search engine. You need to implement robots.txt so that it is completely inaccessible for users to access your website.
Likewise, you can implement the same technique for a particular page on your website that is undergoing any maintenance or development phase. This is beneficial because you don’t want the web pages to get indexed which affects the quality of your website.
5. Control unethical bot accessing your website
As you all are aware that there are many unethical bots released to target websites. This is done so that your website’s personal credentials can be stored by hackers or get injected with any kind of malware or virus within the website. Through the robots.txt file, you can easily control all these spyware bots and restrict them from accessing your website. But you need to know which are the unethical bots and give instructions accordingly.
Benefits of robots.txt in SEO
Search engine professionals use robots.txt specifically for the technical optimization of the website. One of the most crucial aspects when it comes to deciding how the search engine needs to react on a website when they encounter it.
1. Benefits in crawl frequency
The robots.txt is one of the most primary reasons for you to use robots.txt in determining the indexation frequency for your website. You have the complete authority to direct the search engine crawlers whether they have to crawl the web pages that have been published immediately or whether you want to delay the process.
Every action has its own advantages in receiving results from search engines. You need to submit the robots.txt file after optimizing it on the respective Webmaster of search engines. Some of the popular platforms are Google webmaster and Bing webmaster.
2. Helps to eliminate the issue within duplicate content
As you all are aware that duplicate content is one of the most threatening situations for a website to get penalized by search engine crawlers. SEO professionals are cautious when it comes to dealing with the duplicate content issue on the website.
If you have any web pages that have been replicated multiple times, you can use the robots.txt file to sideline these pages. Remember to submit the robots.txt to the webmaster every time you make any changes on the file so that you get quick results.
3. Boosts authority of your SEO efforts
When you have tons of content and media files stored on your website, it will be crucial for you to use robots.txt to direct the search engine how the crawl process needs to happen. This is highly beneficial to instantly boost the authority of your SEO efforts in terms of technical optimisation.
Alternatively, you can also specify the location of your site map so that the crawlers understand the web structure. This will ensure that the efficiency of search crawlers will improve over time by properly implementing the robots.txt file.
Limitations of robots.txt
While every process has its own advantages and disadvantages. The robots.txt comes with a few that should not be a major concern.
1. Content will be crawled if it has been linked to the external source
When you have linked a particular web page to an external source and you have directed the search engine crawler for your website to disallow it, this won’t function. As the referral website to which it has been linked will immediately crawl the web page as it is directing a signal for the crawler to go through your content.
2. Unethical bots will still crawl your website
Even after directing the search engine by restricting the spambots, it will still manage to crawl the web pages. Because it is almost impossible for unethical crawlers to restrict your content from being indexed. You need to update your robots.txt file periodically when you encounter such spambots.
3. Your pages will still appear on search engines
After blocking your pages in robots.txt, it’s not guaranteed that the pages will stop appearing on search engines. You need to give some time for the search engines to update their server and refine their results.
Concluding thoughts
Since you have understood what is robots.txt and the benefits of using it for website and SEO purposes, you need to plan to include this strategy in your technical search engine optimization. Please ensure that you need to use the scripts correctly and perform a double check before making the robots.txt file live on your web server.
The best practice after making any changes on robots.txt would be to submit the file to the respective search engine webmaster account and use online robots.txt checker tools to test the efficiency of the file.
Further, read:
This is an excellent writeup for utilizing robots.txt. I just used this for my blog site and connected with google search console almost instantly in being able to be listed/indexed sooner on google, rather than wait for crawlers to locate my site. Thank you so much!