While you work on technical SEO, optimization of the Robots.txt file’s optimization is an essential thing to consider. As Robots.txt is prone to errors, therefore, even a single unwanted configuration or mistake can cause devastation to your SEO.
Moreover, your web traffic and rankings might turn upside down. Unquestionably, it’s an important file that’s a part of every site. However, most people don’t even know and think about it.
Now, let us catch a glimpse of Robots.txt basics as to what they are and their functioning.
Robots.txt: Overview
It’s a file that is present in the website root directory. Also, robots.txt is a manual instruction for the search engine crawlers that decides which files or pages one can request from the website.
It helps sites to get overloaded with requests. Also, the first thing that search engines look at while visiting your website is to check and look for the robots.txt file’s contents.
Thus, it depends on the instructions mentioned in the file; it creates an URLs’ list which they index and crawl for that site.
How a Robots.txt File Appears
Asterisk wildcard usage makes your work seamless as it helps you in assigning directives to every user agent.
Analyzing The Technical Phrases
User-Agent
It refers to a particular bot or chatbot to which you command crawl instructions: search engine.
Disallow
Disallow refers to a command that tells your bot not to crawl a specific URL.
Allow
Allow is a command that tells the internet bot or bot to crawl a specific URL in an otherwise disallowed directory.
Sitemap
It helps in specifying and identifying the sitemap(s) location to the bot. You can place the directives of the sitemap at the beginning o at the end of the robots.txt file.r
Crawl-Delay
It helps determine the total number of seconds a crawler must wait before it crawls the web page.
Also, not Google, but Bing and Yahoo are considering this parameter.
Placement of Robots.txt File
One can position robots.txt in any of the essential directories of your site, technically.
However, it is suggested that you must always place it in your domain’s root. Let’s say, if your domain’s name is www.abc.com, now your robots.txt. must be seen/found at www.abc.com/robots.txt.
Also, it is significant to use a lowercase “r” in the file name because the robots.txt file is a case sensitive one. Otherwise, it will not work.
Importance of Robots.txt file
Whether large or a small site, it’s essential having a robots.txt file. And it offers people greater control over search engine movement on your site. But, at the same time, one accidental disallowed instruction can cause Googlebot to crawl your complete website.
§ It prohibits server overloading.
§ Rule out sensitive information from being exposed.
§ Restricts the wastage of the crawl budget.
§ Prevents duplicate content’s crawling.
§ It even prevents unnecessary files’ indexing on your site, including images, PDFs, and videos.
§ It helps in keeping different sections of your site confidential (e.g. staging site).
§ Last but not least, halt crawling for internal search engine results pages.
Robots.txt Working
Search engines have two basic tasks. The first job is to crawl the web for discovering new content. Secondly, you should index the found content for audiences looking for that important piece of information.
Thus, after coming to the site, the crawler searches for a robots.txt file. Also, when the same thing is found, first, the crawler goes via file much before spidering or crawling your site.
Also, the robots.txt file comprises the fact that how a crawler must crawl the site, and going further without referring or mentioning to the file would misinform and mislead the crawler.
And if there’s no particular mention regarding the directives that don’t enable the activity of a user-agent, then the crawler will begin to crawl other information on the website.
Wrap Up
To know more about improving your robots.txt file, you can contact Apps Shoppy’s experts at +44 740 006 7342.
