If your company is looking for ways to increase website traffic, one of the best places you can start is by optimizing robots.txt files. Robots.txt files contain instructions that tell search engine crawlers which pages not to index and where they should look instead of finding new content on a site. SEO entails much more than keyword research and link creation. There is a technological component to SEO that significantly influences your search ranking. This is where the contents of your robots.txt file will play a role. Most individuals, in my experience, are unfamiliar with robots.txt files and are unsure where to begin. That’s what prompted me to write this manual. Let’s start with the fundamentals. What is a robots.txt file, exactly? When a search engine crawler crawls a website, it consults the robots.txt file to see which pages should be indexed. Sitemaps are stored in the robots.txt file and the root folder. To make it simpler for search engines to index your information, you develop a sitemap. Consider your robots.txt file to be a guidebook or guide for bots. It’s manual with guidelines that they must obey. These rules will notify crawlers which portions of your site are open to them (such the pages on your sitemap) and which sections are prohibited. If your website’s robots.txt file isn’t optimized correctly, it might create serious SEO issues. That’s why it’s critical that you understand how this works and what you need to do to make sure that this technical aspect of your website is working for you rather than against you.
Steps to Optimize Your Robots.txt File:
1. Locate the robots.txt file.
Before you do anything else, make sure you have a robots.txt file in the first place. Some of you have most likely never been here before. Putting your website’s URL into a web browser, followed by /robots.txt, is the quickest approach to discover whether it already has one. This is what Quick Sprout looks like.
One of three things will happen if you do this.
- A robots.txt file similar to the one seen above may be found. (However, if you’ve never taken the effort to optimize it, it’s unlikely to be as thorough.)
- There’s an empty robots.txt file, yet it’s there.
- Because that page does not exist, you will get a 404 error.
The majority of you will most likely fall into one of the first two categories. Because the majority of websites have a robots.txt file set up by default when they are built, you shouldn’t receive a 404 error. If you’ve never changed anything, the default settings should still be there. Simply browse to the root folder of your website to create or modify this file.
2. Change the contents of your robots.txt file.
Generally speaking, you don’t want to muck about with this too much. It’s not something you’re going to be regularly changing. The only reason you’d want to add anything to your robots.txt file is if you don’t want bots to crawl and index particular pages on your website. You’ll need to learn how to utilize the command syntax. To write the syntax, open a plain text editor. I’ll go through the most often used syntax. You must first identify the crawlers. The User-agent is the term for this. * User-agent All search engine crawlers are referred to using the syntax above (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) Googlebot is the user agent. This value communicates directly to Google’s crawlers, as the name indicates. You may accept or block material on your site once you’ve identified the crawler. Here’s an example from the Quick Sprout robots.txt file that we saw before. * User-agent /wp-content/ is not allowed. This is where we keep our WordPress administrative backend. As a result, this command instructs all crawlers (* User-agent) to skip that page. The bots have no incentive to spend time crawling that. So, let’s assume you want all bots to avoid crawling this particular page on your website. http://www.yourwebsite.com/samplepage1/ The syntax would be as follows: User-agent: * /samplepage1/ is not allowed. Here’s another illustration: /*.gif$ is not allowed. This would prevent a certain file type from being opened (in this case .gif). It may find more frequent rules and examples in this Google graphic.
The principle is quite simple. To prevent all crawlers (or sure crawlers) from accessing specific pages, files, or material on your site, you have to look up the correct syntax command and paste it into your plain text editor. Then, simply copy and paste the instructions into your robots.txt file after you’ve done composing them.
3. Why is it necessary to optimize the robots.txt file?
I understand what some of you would be thinking. So what makes me think I’d want to bother with any of this? Here’s what you’ll need to know. The goal of your robots.txt file isn’t to entirely prohibit search engines from indexing your sites or information. Instead, you’re simply attempting to make their crawl budgets as efficient as possible. You’re just informing the bots that they don’t need to crawl sites that aren’t intended for public consumption. Here’s a quick rundown of Google’s crawl budget. It is divided into two sections:
- Crawl rate restriction
- Demand for crawling
The crawl rate limit is the maximum number of connections a crawler may make to a single site. This covers the period between fetches as well. Websites that react rapidly have a greater crawl rate limit, allowing them to connect with the bot more often. On the other hand, sites that slow down as a consequence of crawling will be crawled less frequently. Sites are also crawled in response to user demand. Popular websites are crawled more often as a result of this. Sites that aren’t popular or updated regularly, on the other hand, will be crawled less frequently, even if the crawl rate restriction hasn’t been reached. You’re making the crawlers’ work considerably simpler by optimizing your robots.txt file. These are some examples of factors that impact crawl budgets, according to Google:
- Identifiers for sessions
- Navigation with several faces
- Pages with errors
- Hacker-infested websites
- Content that is duplicated
- Proxies and infinite spaces
- Content of poor quality
- Spam
By employing the robots.txt file to prevent crawlers from accessing this material, you can guarantee that they spend more time finding and indexing the most important content on your site. Here’s a visual comparison of areas with and without a robots.txt file that has been optimized.
On the left website, a search engine crawler will spend more time and, as a result, more of the crawl budget. The site on the right, on the other hand, guarantees that only the most critical material gets indexed. Here’s an example of when you wish to use the robots.txt file. Duplicate material is terrible for SEO, as you’re probably aware. However, there are situations when having it on your website is vital. Some of you, for example, may have printer-friendly copies of some pages. That is a case of duplicating content. By optimizing your robots.txt syntax, you can instruct bots not to crawl that printer-friendly page.
4. Put your robots.txt file to the test.
It’s time to test everything to make sure it’s running correctly once you’ve located, edited, and optimized your robots.txt file. You’ll need to enter into your Google Webmasters account to achieve this. From your dashboard, go to “crawl.”
The menu will be expanded as a result of this. Search for the “robots.txt Tester” option when you’ve developed it.
Then, in the bottom right corner of the screen, click the “test” button.
If you run into any issues, you can alter the syntax in the tester. Carry on with the testing until everything is in order. Please keep in mind that any changes you make in the tester will not be stored to your website. As a result, make sure that any modifications are copied and pasted into your robots.txt file. It’s also worth mentioning that this tool is intended only for the purpose of testing Google bots and crawlers. It will have no way of knowing how other search engines would interpret your robots.txt file. Given that Google has 89.95 percent of the worldwide search engine industry, I don’t believe you need to use any other technologies to do these experiments. But I’ll let you make that choice.
5. Best practices for robots.txt.
To be discovered, your robots.txt file must be titled “robots.txt.” It’s case-sensitive, so Robots.txt or Robots.TXT aren’t going to work. The robots.txt file must always be in the root folder of your website in the host’s top-level directory. Your robots.txt file is visible to anybody. To read it, users only need to enter in the name of your website URL followed by /robots.txt after the root domain. So, because it’s public information, don’t use it to be devious or deceitful. I wouldn’t propose creating separate rules for various search engine crawlers for the most part. I don’t understand how having one set of criteria for Google and another set of rules for Bing is beneficial. If your restrictions apply to all user agents, it’s less complicated. Disallow syntax in your robots.txt file will not stop that page from being indexed. You’d have to use the noindex tag instead. Crawlers for search engines are pretty sophisticated. They look at your website’s content in the same manner that a human would. You should not block such files in your robots.txt file if your website relies on CSS and JS to operate. If crawlers can’t view a working version of your website, it’ll be a significant SEO blunder. If you want your robots.txt file to be recognized right away once it’s been changed, instead of waiting for your website to be crawled, send it straight to Google. It is impossible to transfer link equity from prohibited pages to link destinations. This indicates that links on forbidden websites will be treated as no-follow. As a result, certain links will not be indexed unless they are on search engine-friendly sites. The robots.txt file is not a replacement for preventing private user data and other sensitive material from appearing on your search engine results pages (SERPs). Disallowed pages may still be indexed, as I previously said. As a result, you’ll need to encrypt these pages with a password and use the noindex meta directive. Your robots.txt file should include sitemaps at the bottom.
Conclusion
That was your crash course on all things related to robots.txt files. I understand that a lot of this material was technical, but don’t let that deter you. Your robots.txt’s core ideas and uses are pretty simple to grasp. Remember that this isn’t something you’ll want to change very often. It’s also critical that you test everything before committing the changes. Make sure you verify everything twice and three times. A single blunder might result in a search engine abandoning your site entirely. This would be disastrous for your SEO ranking. As a result, only make adjustments that are absolutely required. Your website will be crawled effectively by Google’s crawl budget if appropriately optimized. This enhances the likelihood that your most important material will be discovered, indexed, and ranked properly. The “robots.txt sitemap” is a file that sits on your website and tells search engines what pages they can crawl and index. This is important because if you’re running an online business, you want to make sure that every page of your website is indexed so that people can find it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I optimize a robot’s txt file?
A: The optimal size for a text file is 255 KB. If the file is more significant than that, it will increase its processing time and decrease the speed of your robot.
What should be in my robot’s txt file?
A: This is your text file. You may name it whatever you like and put anything in it, as long as the contents are appropriate for a txt file.
Related Tags
- robots.txt disallow all example
- robots.txt example
- robots.txt tester
- robots.txt syntax
- robots.txt google