Why robots.txt is so importance for SEO and What is the advantage of robots.txt
Robots.txt is one of the simplest files on a website, robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site.
Robots.txt is a text file website admins(Webmasters) create to teach web robots (commonly search engine robots) the most proficient method to crawl pages on their websites. Robots.txt is a book document website admins make to train web robots (commonly search engine robots) on the best way to crawl pages on their sites. The robots.txt file is essential for the robot’s exclusion protocol (REP), a gathering of web standards that control how robots crawl the web, access, and index content, and serve that content up to users.
Basic format:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
How Robots.txt Work
Search engine tools convey little programs called “spiders” or “robots” to look through your website and take information back to the web crawlers with the goal that the pages of your website can be recorded in the list items and found by web users.
User-agents
- Crawling the web to discover content
- Indexing that content so that it can be served up to searchers who are looking for information.
To crawl sites, search engines follow connections to get starting from one website to another – at last, crawling across many numbers of links and websites. This crawling behavior is sometimes known as “spider.” But here are some useful ones for SEO:
- Google: Googlebot
- Google Images: Googlebot-Image
- Bing: Bingbot
- Yahoo: Slurp
- Baidu: Baiduspider
- DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckBot
For example, let’s say that you wanted to block all bots except Googlebot from crawling your site. Here’s how you’d do it
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Why do you need robots.txt?
Robots.txt files control crawler admittance to specific regions of your site. While this can be dangerous on the off chance that you incidentally disallow Googlebot from crawling your whole site, there are a few circumstances where a robots.txt file can be very convenient.
For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your thank you page, that page will not have the option to appear in the indexed lists, and web users will not have the option to discover it. Holding the search engines back from getting to specific pages on your website is fundamental for both the security of your site and for your SEO.
- Preventing the crawling of duplicate content
- Keeping sections of a website private (e.g., your staging site)
- Preventing the crawling of internal search results pages
- Preventing server overload
- Preventing Google from wasting “crawl budget”
- Preventing images, videos, and resources files from appearing in Google search results
If there are no areas on your site to which you want to control user-agent access, you may not need a robots.txt file at all.
How to check if you have a robots.txt file
Not sure if you have a robots.txt file? Basically type in your root domain, at that point add/robots.txt to the end of the URL. For example, Moz’s robots file is arranged at moz.com/robots.txt.
Assuming no .txt page shows up, you don’t right now have a (live) robots.txt page.
How to create a robots.txt file
If you don’t already have a robots.txt file, making one is simple. Simply open a blank .txt document and start typing directives. For example, in the event that you needed to disallow all web search engines tools from crawling your/administrator/directory, it would look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Conclusion
It’s important to update your Robots.txt file in the event that you add pages, files, or directories to your website that you don’t wish to be ordered by the search engine tools or got to by web users. This will guarantee the security of your site and the most ideal outcomes with your site improvement.
