Robots.txt for SEO: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
One of the newest and most important developments in search engine optimization is a robots.txt file. Robots.txt files control how website content is indexed per folder by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other major search engines.
Because this file can be used to exclude all or some crawling from specific directories and individual pages within those directories. It is an invaluable tool for adding SEO value to any website regardless of size.
To fully understand the potential that a properly configured robots file offers for your website, it’s helpful to define what exactly one does and how it works. This article will address these two topics and detail the basic structure of a robots.txt for SEO, the ultimate guide for beginners. In addition, you’ll want to pair up with a successful SEO agency near you. Most business SEO companies and marketing agencies have a good handle on what a Robots.txt file is and can walk you through everything.
What is a Robots.txt File?
It’s called the robots exclusion protocol, similar to how it sounds. An exclusion protocol that excludes all or some bots from crawling specific folders on your website. A file named “robots.txt” should be located within the topmost directory of your site that you wish to exclude from search engine crawling.
If the file is not found in this location, it should be created so long as it is not blocked by any security software running on the machine where it will reside. Once created, list out each directory you do not want to be crawled within individual ‘allow’ or ‘disallow’ commands.
For example, suppose you had a blog at http://myblog.com, and you wanted to keep the entire /wp-content/ directory from being crawled by Google since it contains all of your site’s images, JavaScript files etc. You would place a robots.txt file at http://myblog.com/robots.txt with the following contents:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Keep in mind that this command applies to all search engines, so once the robots exclusion protocol has been established for a specific folder on your website, it cannot be modified later without deleting its original entry and starting over with fresh commands.
This is why many developers choose to ‘comment out’ directories they do not want crawling rather than listing them individually within the same file.
Why Does it Matter?
The robots exclusion protocol matters because it allows website owners to control which search engines index pages and folders. When used in conjunction with canonicalization techniques, the robots file can be a powerful tool for boosting SEO-friendly content within a website.
It’s important to note that while the robot’s file can be used to exclude content, it cannot be used to include content – that must be done through other methods such as adding meta tags or using rel=canonical tags.
Basic Structure of a Robots File
Now that you know what a robots file is and some reasons why you might want to use one, let’s take a look at the basic structure of a robots file and its parts:
Allow: This command is used to specifically allow crawling of all or some bots of a specific user-agent. For example, if you wanted to let Googlebot access to crawl your site, but not Bing’s Slurp crawler, you would place an allow command like the following into your robots.txt file.
Disallow: This command works oppositely as an ‘allow’ command and prevents search engine crawling of all or some bots on a per-user-agent basis. If we were to use our previous example and instead disallowed both Google and Bing from accessing content on our website, we would use two disallow commands like so:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-content/
User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /wp-content/
Crawl-delay: This optional command can be used to throttle the number of requests that a search engine crawler makes to your website over a given period (in seconds). For example, if you placed a crawl-delay value of 60 into your robot’s file, it would tell any crawlers that visit your site to wait 1 minute between each request.
Sitemap: If you have an XML sitemap for your website, you can list its location within the robot’s file using this command.
How to Optimize Your Robot Submission for Successful SEO
Now that you know how to create a robots exclusion file, we will show you how to optimize it to help you build a successful SEO strategy. The following tips will help you make sure your website is fully crawled and indexed by the search engines:
- Make sure all important pages are included in your robots.txt file. This includes your home page, contact page, and any other vital pages on your website. You can block crawlers from all other directories not listed in the rule.
- Make sure you don’t block any pages that should be indexed by search engines, such as your “About Us” page or essential blog posts. It would be best if you found a balance between what should be blocked and what shouldn’t so you can get indexing without over-stuffing your robots.txt file with unnecessary rules.
Some directories may also have certain specific purposes that are better left for crawling, which is why you should only block out entire directories if necessary.
- Be careful when using wildcards because they could cause problems with large websites with thousands of files in multiple directories (most web admins only use wildcards on their home page). Websites with many directories and files can take longer for search engines to crawl and index, so you may want to reconsider using them on your website.
- Use the robots.txt tester tool to check the syntax and validity of your robot’s exclusion file before uploading it to your website. This will help you make sure no errors prevent your website from indexing by search engines.
Benefits of Robots.txt Files
Robots.txt is a text file that blocks search engine bots and other web robots from crawling or indexing specific directories on your site while allowing them access to the rest of your website content.
It’s essential not to take this literally, though – just because you tell Google about some parts of your site doesn’t mean it will immediately start indexing them! Instead, the best way to think about Robots.txt is as an opportunity for you to guide Google towards providing your users with faster searching and better browsing experiences.
Allowing Googlebot the access it needs will help ensure that they crawl your site more frequently, find new links between pages more efficiently, see the fresh content you add to your site, and find all relevant metadata that helps Google understand your site.
This, in turn, will help users find more of your content via search results because Google will be able to index more web pages from your site when they do these periodic crawls.
Robots exclusion protocol is a standard used by websites to inform search engines not to crawl specific parts of their website. A search engine can’t read a robot’s file, so often, it’s hard for them to follow robot’s rules.
Robots exclusion protocol was created initially for crawling purposes, but later people found its other benefits like blocking competitor crawling or preventing user agent spammers crawling.
When someone goes online searching for something, what comes on top of search results are the websites that have all content indexed by Google. This is because Google crawls these sites more often than others, so they are listed on top within a few seconds of the search being initiated.
If you own a website, you need to understand that while the robots exclusion protocol was mainly designed to prevent crawling, there are many other reasons too that make robots file an expected file in every website owner’s tool belt.
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Ten Advantages of Robots.txt
Easily block competitor crawling with Robots.txt
If your site has one or more pages upon which no other site should be given access, using the Robots Exclusion Protocol can help increase your SEO efforts by restricting access to competitors who follow links from your site.
Crawl no more with Robots.txt
It’s also an effortless way to tell Googlebot not to crawl specific parts of your website that might be time-consuming or unnecessary for them, such as shopping cart pages that don’t get updated often or sites that have been redesigned and therefore won’t be indexed appropriately by the search engine.
User-agent DoS prevention via Robots.txt
Robots.txt can prevent user agent DoS-type attacks if a web admin uses it correctly. However, some SEOs tend to abuse this feature of robots file by blocking all bots from crawling their websites which they think is an easy way out from being penalised, but in reality, this acts against the very purpose and reason behind creating robots files.
Robots.txt is a way to tell Google what to ignore and index
If you don’t want some aspects of your site to be indexed – for example, if you have off-topic content on your site that isn’t beneficial for the user but is only there as filler – or if there’s some content that you’ve marked as “noindex” in the HTML code, then the best thing to do is create an XML sitemap and point out those pages with values of “noindex.”
Improve crawling and indexing with Robots.txt
For example, let’s say we have a website at www.example.com/mycoolblog/. We want Googlebot to crawl and index a few pages on the website more often than others, such as www.example.com/mycoolblog/index.html, but there are also some pages that we don’t want to be indexed at all, such as www.example.com/mycoolblog/privatepage/.
To tell Googlebot which pages to crawl and index more frequently and which pages to avoid crawling and indexing altogether, we would add the following lines to our Robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
This will tell Googlebot to crawl all of the pages on our website except for www.example.com/mycoolblog/privatepage/, which will be indexed at a crawling delay of 10.
Crawler traps with Robots.txt
Another common use for Robots.txt is to set up crawler traps, which are pages that are intentionally designed to confuse or mislead search engine bots into thinking they’re more important than they are. For example, you might have an entire section of your website devoted to bogus products you want to advertise in the search results but don’t want people to visit.
By creating a page like www.example.com/mycoolblog/crawlertrap.html and including it in your Robots.txt file, you can ensure that Googlebot never indexes that page (or any other pages in the same directory), thus preventing it from ever appearing in the search engine results.
Improve crawl budget via Robots.txt
One of the essential factors in how often a web page appears within search results is the number of times Googlebot “crawls” that page. Crawling occurs when Googlebot visits a website and indexes all the content it finds on each of those pages to be found more quickly by users later on.
By restricting access to your competitors, you ensure that they receive fewer backlinks, thus reducing their organic PageRank and decreasing their capacity to rank well in search results.
Reduce indexation time with Robots.txt
If you accidentally delete some files from your server or change some settings related to your website, you can use Robots.txt to stop Googlebot from indexing your website until you’re ready.
This will help prevent any erroneous information from being indexed by the search engine and save you a great deal of time and effort to get everything back in order.
Tool for debugging website issues with Robots.txt
One of the lesser-known benefits of using Robots.txt is that it can debug website issues. For example, if you notice that Googlebot isn’t indexing some of your pages even though they appear to be crawlable, you can use Robots.txt to troubleshoot the problem.
By examining the logs generated by Robots.txt, you can see which pages are being accessed by Google’s bots and which are not, which will help you to identify the scope of the problem.
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Conclusion
Web admins can give crawlers specific instructions on which areas of their website should and should not be visited using the robots exclusion file. This hidden SEO weapon can be used to gain an advantage over the competition by optimizing your robot submission for successful SEO.
This article shows you how to create a robot exclusion file and optimize it for your website. Hooking up with the best SEO agency in your area will help you big time too. Bizmap LLC is a marketing agency located in NJ .We’ve included some of the Bizmap locations below.
We hope you find this helpful information and that it helps you improve your website’s ranking in the search engines.
