Are you looking for ways to improve your website's search engine ranking? One of the essential tools you will need to familiarize yourself with is robots.txt. This file plays a significant role in telling web robots or crawlers what pages on your site they should and shouldn't access.
In this post, we will dive into the basics of robots.txt, including the six most frequently asked questions about this file.
Robots.txt is a text file that webmasters create to instruct web robots about how to interact with certain pages on their site. This file resides on the root directory of a website, and it is accessed by web robots before they start crawling your site.
Using robots.txt helps in controlling the flow of traffic that crawlers get from your website. It also helps to avoid duplication issues that may arise from having multiple versions of your website pages, which may affect your SEO ranking negatively.
When a web robot comes across a website, it looks for the robots.txt file in the root directory. The robot reads the directives coded in the file and follows them when it crawls the site or indexes its pages.
In your robots.txt file, you can include specific folders or files that you don't want crawlers to access. However, ensure that you don't block access to essential files like XML sitemaps that help web crawlers understand your website better.
You can test your robots.txt file using Google's robot testing tool. The tool simulates how Googlebot would interact with your website based on the directives found in the file.
Using robots.txt is a crucial part of SEO best practices. It helps web robots crawl your site more efficiently and prevents them from accessing files or folders you don't want them to.
