SEO goes above and beyond keyword research and building backlinks. Another technical side of SEO has cropped up that can impact your search ranking.
This is the perfect time for your robots. Txt file to become a factor.
As much as my experience is, many people are unfamiliar with robots.txt files and need help knowing where to start. That’s what fired my imagination to create this guide.
I want to start with the basics. What is What’sexactly a robot.txt file?
When a search engine bot crawls a site, it uses the robots.txt file to figure out what website parts it should index.
Sitemaps are stored in your root folder and the robots.txt file. You design a sitemap so search engines can confidently index your content.
Let’s take your robots.txt file as a guide manual for bots. It’s a guide with rules that they should abide by. However, these rules will clue crawlers what they’re OK’d to see (like the pages on your sitemap)and what parts of your website are restricted.
Robots.txt file can bring about big SEO problems for your site when it’s not optimized correctly.
This is why it’s essential to know how this works properly and what steps you should take to ensure that this technical element of your site is helpful instead of foul-up you.
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Discover your robots.txt file
Do you have a robots.txt file to start with? Before you do anything, make sure that you have it. Most likely, some of you didn’t come here before.
If you want to see that your website already has one, put your URL into a web browser, followed by/robots.txt.
Here’s what it looks like for A One Sol.
When you do this, it’s probably to happen one of three things;
- You’ll get a robots.txt file that’d be the same as the one above. (Although if you still need to get the time to improve it, it’s likely not as in-depth).
- You’ll see a blank robots.txt file; however, at least set up.
- You’ll see a 404 error because that page doesn’t exist.
Most of you either will get into the first or second scenario. You will likely not get a 404 error because most sites receive a robots.txt file setup by default when a website develops. If you didn’t make any changes to your website, those default settings need to be there.
Whether you want to create or edit this file, you must navigate to your site’s root folder.
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Modify your robots.txt content
For the most part, you normally prefer to avoid falling about with this so much. Meanwhile, you can modify it sparingly.
When it comes to adding something to yourrobots.txt file, the only reason to do it is that there are many pages on your site that you want to disallow bots to crawl and index.
Now, you should get familiar with the syntax that’s used for commands. So, open a plain text editor to note down the syntax.
I’m going to cover the syntax that’s used generally.
First of all, identify the crawlers. This is alluded to as the User-agent.
User-agent: *
However, this syntax above refers to all search engine crawlers (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
User-agent: Googlebot
As the name implies, this value is telling straight to Google’s crawlers.
When you point out the crawler, you can allow or disallow content on your site.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
This page is utilized for our administrative backend for WordPress. So, this command is responsible for informing all crawlers (User-agent: *)not to crawl this page. There’s no reason for the bots to fritter away the time crawling that.
So, you need to clue in all the bots not to crawl this page on your site. http://www.example.com/samplepage3/
The syntax would be like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /samplepage1/
Here’s another example:
Disallow: /*.gif$
This might stop a particular file type (in this scenario .gif). You could allude to this chart from Google for more general rules and examples.
The concept is so simple.
Whether from all crawlers or specific crawlers, if you don’t allow pages, files or content on your website, you need to acquire the proper syntax command and include it in your plain text editor.
When you’ve completely jotted down the commands, now, copy and paste them into your robots.txt
Why robots.txt file should be optimized
I’m sure some of you are musing on why I would wish to footle around with any of this in the world.
Let me tell you something special here. Neither the purpose of your robot.txt file is to fully block the pages or site content from search engines.
Rather than, you’re just increasing the efficiency of their crawl budgets. Though, you are telling the bots that they don’t shouldn’t crawl the pages that aren’t created for the public.
Here I brought a summary of how Google’scrawl budget proceeds.
So, it’s divided into two parts:
- Crawl rate limit
- Crawl demand
The crawl rate limit indicates how many connections a crawler can build to any provided website. This also adds to the time between fetches.
Sites with a higher crawl rate limit are quick to respond, which means they could have more connection with that bot than any other website with a low crawl rate limit. Meanwhile, sites that slow down due to crawling would be crawled less regularly.
Websites are also crawled based on the requirement. This indicates that famous, popular sites are crawled more regularly. On the other hand, unpopular websites might not be crawled more frequently, even if the crawl rate limit has not been satisfied.
If you are improving your robots.txt file, you’re getting the crawlers’ job done as easily as needed. As Google says, these are some examples of the elements that have an impact on crawl budgets:
- Session identifiers
- Faceted navigation
- Error pages
- Pages that have been hacked
- Duplicate content
- Infinite spaces and proxies
- Low-quality content
- Spam
Having the robots.txt file to prevent this type of content from crawlers ensures that they take up much more time finding and indexing the best content on your site.
Here’s a visual comparison of the websites with and without an optimized robots.txt file. Have a look.
A search engine crawler would take up more time and, as a result, more of the crawl budget on the left side. However, the website on the right confirms that only the best, top content is crawled.
Here’s a situation where you’ll desire to benefit from the robots.txt file.
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As you know well, duplicate content is unfavourable to SEO. But there are some but not all times when it’s critical to have on your site. For example, some of you would own printer-friendly versions of particular pages. That’s duplicate content. By optimizing your robots.txt syntax, you can let bots know not to crawl that printer-friendly page.
Testing your robots.txt file
Have you discovered, altered, and optimizedrobots.txt file? Now, it’s time to test everything to ensure it’s doing the job well.
You’ll have to sign into your Google Webmaster account to complete this. Navigate to “crawl” from your dashboard.
This can enlarge the menu.
When expanded, you’ll look at the “robots.txt Tester” option.
After that, you will see the “test” button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Click it.
What you will be doing, if you get any problem there, is to edit the syntax directly in the tester. Go on with running the tests until everything is
Be privy to those modifications made in the tester that is not getting saved to your site. So, you need to copy and paste any modifications into your genuine robots.txt file.
It’s also worth reading that this tool is to test Google bots as well as crawlers. It may not be able to tell how other search engines will read your robots.txt file.
Believing that Google presides over 89.95 per cent of the global search engine market share, it isn’t important to run these tests using other tools. Nonetheless, I’d leave that decision to your choice of you.
Robots. Txt best practices
If you want to find your robots.txt file, you need to name it. But it’s case-sensitive, meaning Robots.txt orrobots.TXT will be unacceptable.
The robots.txt file should, every time, be in the root folder of your site in a top-level directory of the host.
Everyone can view your robots.txt file. To see it, they must type in your site URL name, followed by/robots.txt after the root domain. So, never use this as misleading since it’s important public information.
I don’t recommend having specific rules for different search engine crawlers. I couldn’t see the benefit of having a particular set of rules for Google and another for Bing or Yahoo. It’s much clearer if your rules apply to all user agents.
When you add a disallow syntax to your robots. Txt file doesn’t mean that it will prevent that page from being indexed. Rather, you’ll have to use a noindex tag.
Beyond doubt, search engine crawlers are incredibly advanced. They mainly see your site content the way the real peeps will. So, if your site used CSS and JS to function, avoid blocking those folders in your robots.txt file. If crawlers cannot view a functioning version of your site, it can be a big SEO mistake.
If you desire your robots.txt file to be found instantly after its updates, you should submit it directly to Google instead of waiting for your site to get crawled.
Link equity may not be proceeded from blocked pages to link destinations. This indicates that links on pages that aren’t allowed would be considered nofollow. Some links might not index unless they’re on odd web pages that are reachable by search engines.
However, the robot.txt file isn’t a substitute for stopping private user data and other sensitive information from appearing in your SERPs (search engine result pages). As I said earlier, the disallowed pages can still be indexed. So, you should ensure that these pages are password protected and exploit no index meta directive.
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Sitemaps need to be placed at the bottom of your robots.txt file.
Conclusion
That’s your basic course on everything you need about robots.txt files.
I know most of this information is technical, but keep that from pushing you around. The basic concepts, as well as applications of your robots.txt, are simple and easy to grip.
Remember, this is something that you’ll only need to change occasionally. It’s also necessary to test everything out before saving the changes. I’ll recommend you strongly to double and triple-check everything.
One error can bring about a search engine to stop crawling your website altogether. This may hurt your SEO position. So, it’s good to change only those things that are necessary.
Once optimized correctly, your site must be crawled cleverly by Google’s crawl budget. This increases the possibility that your best, top content will be noticed, indexed, and ranked appropriately.
