The Robots.txt file has the role of a guide on websites. Stay with us in this article to learn about its use.
Robots.txt is a text file that website owners create to teach web robots (actually mostly search engine robots) how to crawl their site pages. This file is part of the Robot Rejection Protocol (REP), a group of standards that determine how robots can crawl the web, access and index content, and display that content to audiences. REP also includes part letters such as Meta robots, along with page subdirectories or site-wide guidelines to indicate how search engines treat links (such as follow and nofollow links).
In practice, Robots.txt files indicate whether certain user agents (web crawlers) can or cannot crawl parts of a website. These site review instructions are dedicated to allowing or disallowing a specific behavior from a user agent. See the basic format of this file in this section.
Together, these two lines count as a complete Robots.txt file. Although one bot file can contain several lines of user agents and directives. Within a Robots.txt file, each set of User Agent directives appears as a separate set, separated by a space between the lines.
In a Robots.txt file with multiple user directives, each grant or disqualification rule will be assigned only to the users specified in that separate directive. If a file contains a rule that applies to more than one user, a crawler will only pay attention to the most specific group of rules.
Msnbot, discobot, and slurp are all explicitly named, so those bots will only pay attention to the main section in their fields in the Robots.txt file. Other User Agents will follow the directives placed in the User Agent* group. If you still don’t understand the meaning of these files and their importance, let’s look at the matter a little more simply.
Table of Contents
What is the importance of the Robots.txt file?
First of all, we should see why Robots.txt files are important to us. As mentioned, these files are a text file that tells the web robots which pages to crawl your site, but these files also tell the said robot which pages to ignore.
Suppose a search engine wants to visit a site. Before visiting the target site, it checks the Robots.txt file for instructions. There are many different types of these files, so let’s take a look at some examples of their different forms.
Suppose a search engine finds this example of a Robots.txt file:
User Agent: *
Disallow: /
This is the basic skeleton of a Robots.txt file. The star after User Agent means that the Robots.txt file is applied to all web robots that visit the site. Also, the slash mark after Disallow tells the robot which pages not to visit. Maybe you have a question about why a person should not want some pages of his site to be visited. One of the biggest goals of SEO is to make it easy for search engines to crawl your site so they can increase your ranking. This is where the SEO trick of this section comes into play.
You probably have a lot of pages on your site, right? Even if you think it isn’t, you might be surprised. If a search engine crawls your site, it will crawl all your pages, and if you have many pages, it will take some time for the search engine to crawl your site, which can affect your ranking. What is the reason for this? Because the Google bot has a “crawl budget”. This budget is divided into two parts, the first part is Crawl. Let’s see Google’s definition of this section.
Creep limit
The Google bot is designed to be a good citizen on the web. Reviewing is its top priority, while it certainly results in creating a user experience for users who don’t visit the site. We call this review hinting, which limits the review value of a given site.
In simple terms, this rate represents the number of concurrent parallel connections that the Google bot may use to check the site, along with the time it must wait between. The evaluation can go up and down based on two factors:
Crawl health: If the site responds very quickly for a while, it means that you can use more for the review. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit is lowered and the Google bot checks less.
Limits set in Search Console: Owners can reduce the Google bot’s reviews on their site. Note that raising the limits does not automatically increase the review.
The second part is the review.
Requested Crawl
Even if the bot has not reached the crawl limit, if it is used for indexing, it will increase the activity of the Google bot. Two factors play a key role in specifying a crawl request in this section:
Popularity: Links that are more popular on the Internet are crawled more to be more recent in our index.
Stagnation: Our systems try to prevent links from stagnating in the index.
Additionally, site-level events such as sites can increase content usage. Considering the review evaluation and use of our review can be reviewed budget that Google can decide and can determine.
The review budget is the number of links that the Google bot can and can review. You make the Google bot use its budget in the best way for your site. In other words, the bot should check your most valuable pages. There are certain factors that, according to Google, hurt the review and indexing of your site. Let’s check these factors.
Project invoices on the budget to review and index the site
According to our reviews, having junk links can affect your site’s review and indexing. We found that low-value links fall into these categories, which are listed in the order below:
- Surfing and identification of recipients of Sessions
- Repeated on the site
- Error pages
- Hacked pages
- Infinite spaces and proxies
- Spam and poor-quality
Wasting server resources on pages like these Crawling activities on pages that devalue them can result in a significant focus on finding great images on your site.
Creating Robots.txt file
You can create this file as mentioned using a simple text editor like Notepad. If you already have this file, make sure you delete its text. First, you should familiarize yourself with a series of terms used in the field of these files.
The simplest Robots.txt file uses 2 keywords, User Agent and Disallow. User Agents are search engine bots; Most of them are in the list of web bots database. Disallow is a command for the User Agent that tells them not to access a specific link. On the other hand, to give Google access to a specific link that is a subdirectory located in a disallowed parent directory, you can use a third keyword called Allow.
Google uses several User Agents, such as Googlebot for searching and Googlebot-image for searching Google images. Most Google User Agents follow the rules you set for Googlebot, but you can change this option and set specific rules for other Google User Agents.
The way to use terms, especially in this field is as follows:
User Agent: [name of the robot to which the desired rule is applied]
Disallow: [path of the link you want to block]
Allow: [link path of a subdirectory, within a blocked parent directory, that you want to unblock]
These two lines together are considered as the only entry in the file, where the Disallow rule is applied only to the User Agents specified above. You can include as many entries as you want, and multiple Disallow lines can be applied to multiple User Agents. You can list the User Agent command to apply to all web bots via an asterisk (*) as in the example below.
User Agent: *
In this section, we’re going to teach you how to set up a simple Robots.txt file, and then we’ll see how we can optimize it for SEO.
Start by setting up User Agents. We want you to set it so that it applies to all web bots. We do this by using an asterisk after User Agent as in the example below.
User Agent: *
Then type Disallow but don’t type anything after that.
Disallow:
Since there is nothing after Disallow, the web bots will crawl your entire site. Now, your entire site is available to them. By now your file should look like this:
User Agent: *
Disallow:
Granted, it sounds pretty simple, but these two short lines already do a lot. You can also link to your XML sitemap, but this is not necessary. If you want to do this, you should type something like this:
Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Believe it or not, a simple Robots.txt file looks like this. Now we have to go to the next step and see how this file can be used to improve SEO.
Optimizing Robots.txt for SEO
How you optimize this file depends entirely on the content you have on your site. There are several ways to use this file to your advantage. In this section, we discuss some of the more common ways to use them. Keep in mind that you should not use Robots.txt to block pages from search engines at all!
One of the best ways to use this file is to maximize the search engine’s review budget by telling it not to review parts of your site that are not publicly visible. For example, if you look at the Robots.txt file of neilpatel.com, you will see that the login page is Disallowed. Since this page is used to log in to the basic section of the site, it doesn’t make sense for search engines to waste their time checking this page.
You can use a similar directive (or command) to prevent bots from crawling certain pages. After Disallow, enter the part of the link that comes after .com, this part must be between two slashes.
You may have been wondering exactly which pages you should not consider getting indexed. In this section, you can see some scenarios where this may happen:
Targeted duplicate content: While duplicate content is generally a bad thing, there are a handful of cases where duplicate content can be necessary and acceptable. For example, if you have a printer-friendly version of a page, you have duplicate content. In this case, you can tell the bots not to check one of these versions. This is also useful when you want to separately test pages that have the same content with different designs.
Thank you pages: The thank you page is one of the most popular pages for marketers because it means a new lead. is it true As it turns out, some thank you pages are accessible through Google. This means that people can access these pages without having to go through the process of getting leads, which is not a good thing.
By blocking thank you pages, you ensure that only approved leads can see them. Let’s say that the thank you page has a link https://yoursite.com/thank-you/. In the Robots.txt file itself, this page should look like this.
Disallow: /thank-you/
Since there is no universal rule for which pages are disallowed, your Robots.txt file will be unique to your site. There are two other directives you should be aware of, noindex and nofollow.
The disallows we have used so far do not prevent the page from being indexed. So in theory, you can disallow a page, but it still gets indexed. This is generally not a good thing for you.
This is why the noindex directive exists. This command works with the Disallow command to ensure that the bot does not visit or index certain pages on your site. If you have a page that you don’t want to be indexed, you can use both disallow and noindex commands.
Finally, we come to the nofollow command. This command is the nofollow link. In a nutshell, this command tells the web robot not to check the links on the page, but the nofollow command is implemented a little differently than the other commands because it’s not part of the Robots.txt file.
Although the Nofollow command still commands web bots, the pattern is the same, the only difference is where it happens. First, you need to find the source code of the page you want to change and make sure it is between the <head> tags. Then put this line in there:
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>
So it should look like this:
<head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>
<head>
Make sure not to put this line between any other tags, only <head> tags.
This is another good option for thank-you pages because the web bots will not check links to any lead magnets or other proprietary content. If you want to have both noindex and nofollow commands, use this line of code:
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow,noindex”>
This will give the bots both commands simultaneously.
Finally, you should test your Robots.txt file to make sure everything is valid and working well in the right direction. Google offers a free Robots.txt file tester as part of Webmaster Tools. First, you need to log in to your webmaster account by clicking Sign in at the top right of the image, then select your website and select Crawl from the left bar.
Here you can see the Robots.txt tester, click on it. If there is already code in the box, delete it and replace it with your new file. Select the test from the bottom right. If the test changes to Allowed, it means that your file is valid.
It’s always fun to share lesser-known SEO tricks that can give you a huge edge over others in a variety of ways. By setting up your Robots.txt file properly, you can not only improve your SEO but also help your visitors. If search engine bots spend their crawl budget correctly, they will organize and display your content in the best possible way on the search results page, meaning you will be exposed to more people.