What is a robots.txt file?
Robots.txt is a file that contains the parts of awebsite where search engine robots are prohibited from crawling. It lists URLs that the webmaster does not want Google or any search engine to index and prevents them from visiting and tracking selected pages. When a bot finds a website on the Internet, it first checks the robots.txt file to know what it is
allowed to discover and what to ignore during the crawl explains the Jacksonville SEO experts.
What is robots.txt in SEO?
These tags are required to guide Google bots tofind a new page. They are important because:
- They help optimize the crawl budget, as the spider will only see what is really relevant and will make better use of its time crawling the page.
- An example of a page you don't want Google to find is the "thank you page".
- A Robots.txt file is a good way to force page indexing, by identifying pages. Robots.txt files control crawler access to specific areas of yoursite.
- They can protect all parts of the website because you can create separate robots.txt files per root domain.
- Robots.txt can hide files that shouldn't be indexed, such as PDFs or some images.
Where do you find robots.txt?
Robots.txt files are public. You can simply type in the root domain and add /robots.txt to the end of the URL and you will see the file… if there is one! Warning: Avoid entering private information in this file. You can find and edit the file in your hosting's root directory, check the files admin or the website's FTP.
How to edit robots.txt?
You can do it yourself.
- Create or edit a file with a simple text editor.
- Name the file "robots.txt", using no variations such as capital letters.
Note that we left "Disallow" blank, whichindicates that there is nothing that is not allowed to be crawled.
Add a page if you want to block it.
See how it's not that difficult to configure yourrobots.txt file and edit it at any time. Just keep in mind that what you wantmfrom this action is to get as many bot visits as possible. By preventing them from visiting irrelevant pages, you will ensure that their time spent on the website will be more profitable say the Jacksonville SEO experts.
Finally, remember that SEO's best practice forrobots.txt is to make sure all relevant content is indexable and ready to be
crawled! You can see the percentage of indexable and non-indexable pages out of a site's total pages using SEO's crawl, as well as pages blocked by the robots.txt file.
Robots.txt Use Cases
Robots.txt controls crawler access to certain areasof a website. This can sometimes be dangerous, especially if GoogleBot is accidentally not allowed to crawl the entire site, but there are situations where a robots.txt file can come in handy.
Some of the cases in which it is recommended to userobots.txt are as follows.
- When you want to keep certain parts of a website private, for example, because it's a test page.
- To avoid duplicate content appearing on Google's results page, though, meta bots are an even more desirable option for this purpose.
- When you don't want internal search result pages to appear on a public result page.
- To specify the location of sitemaps.
- To prevent certain files on the website from getting indexed by the search engines.
- Specifying crawl delay to avoid server overload when crawlers load many pieces of content at once.
- If there are no areas on the site where you want to control user-agent access, you may not need the robots-txt file.
Robots.txt SEO Best Practices
Follow these tips to properly manage robots.txtfiles:
1. Don't block content youwant to track.
Nor should you block parts of the website thatshould be tracked.
2. Note that bots will notfollow links to pages blocked by robots.txt.
Unless they are also linked to other pages thatsearch engines can access because they are not blocked, linked resources will not be crawled and ranked. If you have pages that you want to authorize, you should use a blocking mechanism other than robots.txt.
3. Do not use robots.txt toavoid showing confidential data on the search engine results page.
Other pages may link directly to a page containingconfidential information (thus avoiding robots.txt guidelines in your root domain or homepage), which is why it can still be indexed. You should use a different method to prevent the page from appearing in Google search results, such as password protection or the noindex meta tag.
4. Note that some searchengines have multiple user agents.
Most user agents of the same search engine followthe same rules, which is why you don't need to specify guidelines for each search engine crawler, but by doing so you can control how the site is crawled.
5. Search engines cache thecontents of robots.txt but usually update the cached data daily.
If you change the file and want to update itquickly, you can send the robots.txt URL to Google.
6. Limitations of theRobots.txt file
Finally, we're going to see what are the aspectsthat limit the functionality of the robots.txt file:
7. Pages will continue toappear in search results.
Pages that are inaccessible to search engines dueto a robots.txt file but have links can still appear in search results from a crawlable page.
8. Contains instructionsonly.
Google respects the robots.txt file a lot, but it'sstill a guideline, not a mandate.
9. File size
Google supports a limit of 521 kilobytes forrobots.txt files, and if the content exceeds this maximum size, it may ignore
it.
Conclusion
According to Google, the robots.txt file is usually cached for 24 hours say the experts from Jacksonville SEO Company. Something to keep in mind when making file changes. It's not entirelyclear how other search engines handle the cache file, but it's best to avoid caching your robots.txt so that it doesn't take long for search engines to
detect changes.
