In the vast landscape of search engine optimization (SEO), numerous factors contribute to a website’s visibility and hierarchy on search engine result pages (SERPs). One such factor that often goes unnoticed but plays a critical role in SEO is the robots.txt file.
The robots.txt file is a communication channel between website owners and search engine crawlers, providing instructions on what parts of a website should be crawled and indexed. This article will explore the significance of robots.txt in SEO, its structure, and how it impacts a website’s search engine performance.
Let’s get started!
What Is Robots.txt?
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Robots.txt is a text file web admins create to instruct search engine crawlers (spiders or bots) which pages or sections of their website should or should not crawl. The file is placed in the website’s root directory, the main folder containing all other website files.
Robots.txt is essential for web admins who want to control how search engines crawl their websites. Using the robots.txt file helps web admins in preventing search engines’ bots from accessing certain pages or sections of their websites. For example, they may want to block bots from accessing pages containing sensitive information, duplicate content, or low-quality content.
What Does Robots.txt Do?
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1. How to Find Robots.txt
Search engine bots crawl websites by following links from one page to another. When a bot visits a website, it looks for the robots.txt file in the root directory. If it finds the file, it reads the instructions and follows them. It assumes it can crawl all website pages if it does not find the file.
2. How to Read Robots.txt
The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol, uses a specific syntax that webmasters must follow to ensure search engine bots can read and understand the instructions.
How Robots.txt Affects Your Website’s SEO
Robots.txt can have a significant impact on your website’s SEO. Here are the ways that it can affect your website’s ranking:
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1. Preventing Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can negatively affect your website’s SEO because it confuses search engines about which page to rank for particular internal search results pages. Using the robots.txt file to block bots from accessing duplicate pages, you can prevent search engines from indexing them and avoid duplicate content penalties.
2. Preserving Crawl Budget
Search engine bots have limited time and resources to crawl websites. You can preserve your crawl budget by using robots.txt to block bots from accessing pages that do not deliver any value to your website. This indicates that search engines will spend more time crawling pages that are important to your website and less time on those that are not.
3. Protecting Sensitive Information
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Robots.txt can help you protect sensitive information on your website. By using robots.txt to block bots from accessing pages that contain personal or sensitive data, you can prevent that information from being indexed by search engines. This can help contain data breaches and protect your users’ privacy.
4. Preventing Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a black hat technique involving unethical tactics to harm your competitors’ search engine rankings. If you notice that certain bots are engaging in negative SEO activities, you can block them from crawling your website by disallowing their user agents in the robots.txt file. While this won’t stop all bots, it can help deter some malicious activity.
5. Avoiding Penalties
Using robots.txt improperly can result in penalties from search engines. For illustration, if you use robots.txt to block search engine bots from accessing all website pages, you will tell them not to crawl your entire site. This can result in a penalty, as search engines expect websites to be accessible and crawlable. Therefore, it’s essential to use robots.txt correctly when crafting an effective SEO strategy and only block bots from accessing pages that need to be blocked.
6. Compliance with Legal Requirements
In some cases, websites must comply with legal obligations or industry regulations regarding disseminating certain types of information. The robots.txt file can restrict search engine access to specific directories or pages containing such content, ensuring compliance with applicable laws or regulations.
Best Practices for Using Robots.txt
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Here are some best practices for using robots.txt on your website:
1. Only Block Pages That Need to Be Blocked
As mentioned earlier, blocking search engine bots from accessing all pages of your website can result in penalties. Therefore, it’s essential only to block pages or directories that need to be blocked. For example, if you have duplicate pages, you should only block the duplicates and allow bots to crawl the original ones.
2. Use Clear and Concise Instructions
The syntax of the robots.txt file can be challenging to understand, especially for those unfamiliar with coding. Therefore, it’s essential to use clear and concise instructions that search engine bots can understand. Use the user-agent to specify which bots the instructions apply to and the disallow command to specify which pages or directories to block.
3. Test Your robots.txt File
After creating your robots.txt file must be tested to ensure it works correctly. You can use the Google Search Console or other SEO tools to test your robots.txt file and see which pages or directories are blocked. This step can help you avoid penalties and ensure that search engine bots can crawl your entire website correctly.
4. Regularly Update Your robots.txt File
As your website changes, you may need to update your robots.txt file to reflect those changes. For example, if you add new pages to your website, you may need to allow search engine bots to crawl those pages. This step is one of the best SEO practices to improve your rankings on major search engines.
What Protocols Are Used in a robots.txt File?
Below are the most common protocols used in a robots.txt file:
1. User-Agent
The user-agent protocol is used to specify which web crawlers are affected by the rules set out in the robots.txt file. User-agent refers to the name of the web robot that is being targeted. For example, the Googlebot user agent is used by Google crawlers.
By specifying the user agents in the robots.txt file, website owners can apply different rules to different crawlers. This can be useful for websites that want to allow a certain web crawler access to certain pages but not others.
2. Crawl-Delay
The crawl-delay protocol is used to specify how long web robots should wait between accessing pages on a website. This protocol is useful for websites that experience heavy traffic or have limited web server resources. By specifying a crawl delay, website owners can ensure that web robots do not overwhelm their servers with too many requests.
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It’s worth noting that not all web robots support the Crawl-delay protocol. Many web robots, including Googlebot, ignore this protocol altogether.
3. Host
The Host protocol is used to specify the preferred domain name for a website. This protocol can be useful for websites with multiple domain names, or that want to ensure that search engines only index pages on a particular domain. The Host protocol does not tell web robots only to crawl pages on the root domain.
Robots.txt Examples and Protocols
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If you want to prevent a search engine bot from crawling and indexing a particular directory on your site, you can use the following “Disallow” command in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
The “User-agent” directive specifies that the web robot or search engine should follow the instructions. The “Disallow” directive tells the web robots not to access any file or directory that starts with “/directory/.”
It’s important to note that the “Disallow” directive is not a command. This means that web robots are not required to follow the instructions in the robots.txt file. While most web robots will honor the “Disallow” directive, some may ignore it or crawl the pages, as not all search engines recognize this command. Therefore, the Txt file should be seen as a suggestion rather than a foolproof method for controlling access to your site.
Read more on structured data and how it can boost your SEO efforts.
Jacky Chou is an electrical engineer turned marketer. He is the founder of Indexsy, Far & Away, Laurel & Wolf, a couple FBA businesses , and about 40 affiliate sites. He is a proud native of Vancouver, BC, who has been featured on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, Oberlo and GoDaddy.
