How to Use Robots txt for SEO

Here are some suggestions on creating the file especially for Google user agents;

1) The file should follow the Robots Exclusion Standard.

2) It can include one or more rules for allowing or blocking the access to the specified crawler to a particular path of a site.

3) A webmaster should be familiar with almost all the syntax of robots.txt file to understand the subtle behaviour of each syntax.

4) The site cannot be having more than one robots.txt file.

5) The file supports both subdomains (like http://website.demo.com/robots.txt or any non-standard port like (http://demo:8181/robots.txt).

6) If you do not know or having the access to the root folder of your website then it is best to reach the web hosting service provider to keep the robots.txt file inside the same. In case you can’t access to the website root then use meta tags as alternative blocking method.

7) More than one group directives or rules (mentioned one per line) can be included in the robots.txt file.

8) It supports only ASCII characters.

9) A group provides information about to whom it is applied for (user agent) and what all files or directories that an agent cannot/can access. The directives are processed from top to bottom. A web bot associated itself to only one rule set that can be specified separately or comes first.

10) As per the default assumption a bot can crawl any directory or page by a “Disallow:” syntax.

11) The directives used in the file are case-sensitive, like Disallow: /one.xml doesn’t apply to ONE.xml.

12) It applies to the full domain of a website consisting of either https or http protocol.

Usually, the user agents of Bing and Google go with a specific group of directives but by default, first, matching rules are preferable since different search engine web bots interpret the directives in a different manner.

It is also suggested for webmasters to avoid using the crawl-delay syntax as much as possible in their robots.txt file so to reduce the total crawl time of the search engine bots.

You can take the help of robots.txt Tester tool available on the Google’s webmaster console to check whether the Google’s bot’s are able to crawl the URL that you had already blocked from its Search. It can also show the logic errors and syntax warning if there are any in your robots.txt. You can edit there and retest it.

Once everything is fine, you can cope with the changes and update your main file located on your website server. Similarly, you can use different tools to check in advance the crawling behavior of search engine after reading the robots.txt of your website.

You can also check how the robots.txt in your website is performing by using the ‘Blocked URLs; feature inside the ‘Crawl’ section provided on left section of the Google Webmaster Tools. However, it might not show the current or updated version of robots.txt but can be used for testing purposes.

Try to regularly check your robots.txt file using any tool about whether everything is valid in it and the file is operating in the right manner as expected! By the way, it might take many days or even few weeks for a search engine to identify a disallowed URL by reading about the same from the robots.txt and remove its indexing.

After including all the rule sets in the file and naming it with robots.txt it needs to be saved in the main or root folder of the website in the server. A root level folder can be a “www’ or “htdocs” that helps robots.txt to appear next to your domain name.

It is always suggested to keep a reasonable size of robots.txt by avoiding unwanted directives from mentioning in the file. It is because years before John Mueller of Google has already clarified the fact that Googlebot will only access the first 500kB of a robot.txt file. A giant file can be truncated in an undesired way to form a line that might be interpreted as an incomplete rule.

It is also known as Robots exclusion protocol or robots exclusion standard that is used by websites to communicate with web robots or crawlers. Search engines use their robots to categorize the websites.

Webmasters use robots.txt files to instruct or guide such robots to get better indexing of their websites. You do not need a robots.txt file if you do not want to control user-agent access to any area of your website. One can find more details about robots.txt from any advanced topic like How to Create a Search Engine Bot?

For better search engine rankings, it is a best SEO practice to allow its crawlers to reach and access your site with ease. Our website generally consists of lots of unwanted pages than our expectations, and when search engine bots crawl ever page of your site then it will surely consume more time and this will surely be going to negatively affect its ranking.

Google uses the crawl budget (divided into two parts, crawl rate limit and crawl demand) for every website to decide the number of URLs it wants or can scan. So, if you help such bots or user agents to access and index only the most valuable content of your website robots.txt is a must!

An SEO never wants any sections or content to be blocked of a website that is necessary to be crawled.

– A search engine like Google can have multiple user-agents like Googlebot-Image (to search the images) and Googlebot (for organic search). Many user agents that belongs to the same search engine can follow the same rules so many webmasters skip to specify directives for each of these crawlers. An SEO can take advantage of this by mentioning different instructions to each of the crawlers even if they long to one search engine to better control their crawling behaviour.

– For better SEO it is necessary that the disallowed links or pages must not include any further links that need to be followed. So, the blocked page should not passant link equity to the link destination or it is better to use any other blocking mechanism. They must also not be linked with other pages accessible by the search engines i.e. webpages that are not disallowed by meta robots, robots.txt, or else. Otherwise, the important linked resources will not be accessed and indexed by the search engines.

– It is best to submit the robots.url URL directly on the Google after any updates done on the file to ensure its quick access by the targeted user agent. Generally, a search engine updates the cached robots.txt contents once in a day at least.

It is good to mention the location of all or any sitemaps based on the website’s domain at the bottom part of its robots.txt file. By the way, sitemaps are XML files that contain detailed information about the pages of a website like their URL with the related metadata like its importance, its update interval, and the last update.

All such information can be used by search engine bots to intelligently crawl a website. So, in this way webmasters can help the user agents that support Sitemaps to know and access all the URLs from the sitemap and know more about them in their process of discovering pages from one link to another within one or from another site.

For example;

Browser address: https://www.demo.com/robots.txt

Output:

User-agent: *

Disallow: *.dl.html

Allow: /*.html$

Sitemap: https://www.demo.com/en-au/sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://www.demo.com/en-se/sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://www.demo.com/en-us/sitemap.xml

(The above directives are to call more than one sitemaps via robots.txt file.)

There are security risks associated with robots.txt since many malicious bots cannot follow it as well as one can use it to know all the disallowed links and directly access them. So as a solution, you can password protect the area of your website that contains private content so that an intruder can’t access it even after knowing its location.

To present sensitive data from indexing or get appeared in the SERPs (either directly or indirectly i.e. through liked pages) it is best to use any other method than disallowing the same from the robots.txt to block the page. It can be either no index meta directive or password protection methods.

WordPress generally makes a virtual default robots.txt file in the root directly for its websites that can’t be seen on the directory. So, it is always best to create a new file that overlaps with any default settings especially to disallow the login or signup page that doesn’t matter to a search engine!

Many people are usually confused about How to remove Robots txt in WordPress or other platforms. However, the process is the same for all! The robots.txt file needs to be saved on the top-level directory of the website i.e. the root domain or main directory so to help the bots to find it with ease. So, all you need is to delete the file directly from that particular folder or location.

Try not to include the instructions to hide confidential user information inside the robots.txt file. It is because the file is a publically accessible file, one can see its directives by adding /robots.txt at the end of the root domain.

In this manner, anyone can come to know what all pages is allowed by the webmaster of the site to be crawled or not by all or specific web bots. The file must be saved with “robots.txt” name only since it’s case sensitive so no other combination will be accepted by any user agent!

Lastly, you might be confused between x-robots, meta robots, and robots.txt that sounds similar terms. Among them, x-robots and meta are meta directives but robots.txt is a text file and they are used to apply different functions.

To be specific, x-robots and meta are to dictate the indexing behaviour at page element (or individual page) level, whereas robots.txt is to prove information about the director or site-side crawl behaviour.

There are higher chances that the search engine bots can index and display the content of your website on SERPs in the better way and make it more visible by spending its crawl budget well while scanning the same site. By using the robots.txt can also block the crawling of auto-generated WordPress tag pages and prevent any more duplicate content.

Overall, you need to take much care while dealing with what to include in the robots.txt file. After all, a small mistake inside the robots.txt file could make your entire website get deindexed.