What Is Robots.txt file & How To Use Properly For SEO

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The robots.txt is a very important part of a website.

So today in this article we are going to talk about what is robots.txt file is and how to use robots.txt for SEO.

Any search engine like Google or Bing uses a type of program, which collects the necessary information by visiting websites on the Internet and this program keeps going from one website to another.

This type of program is called Web Crawler, Spiders, Bots, or Robots.

In the very early days of the Internet, when both computing power and memory were very expensive.

Some website owners were very upset with these crawlers of the search engines of that time.

Because the website was less at that time and these crawlers repeatedly visited their website.

They kept visiting, due to which their servers could not show their website to real human visitors.

Due to this, the resources of the website were exhausted.

To deal with this problem, some people gave the idea of robots.txt SEO which will give instructions to Search Engines.

Or any type of crawler that the owners of the website are allowed to visit which part of the website and which part of the website.

They are not giving permission.

So in this article, we will look at the following issues –

1. What is robots.txt?

2. What is the role of robots.txt in your website?

3. How to set up robots.txt on your website?

4. How can we check our robots.txt?

Table of Contents

What Is Robots.Txt File In SEO

robots.txt is a type of text file, which is in the root folder of the website.

For this, we take the example of the domain https://xyz.com.

Now whenever a crawler visits this website, he will first find this https://xyz.com/robots.txt.

Even if the Crawler does not find this file, then there is no problem with it.

That Crawler will visit this entire website and will index any part of it according to its own or store the information.

On the contrary, if that robot finds a robots.txt on your website, then it will read it and technically follow its instructions.

That is why it is very important for you to know how to use robots.txt for SEO.

But it is also true here that Data Aggregators, Email Gathering Bots or Search Bots made by Hackers do not follow these instructions.

Here we get some points clear that-

1. robots.txt is a type of text file.

2. The robots.txt files are always in the Main Root Folder of the website.

3. The name of robots.txt is always robots.txt. It can’t be Robot.txt, it can’t be in Capital Letters. Its name will always be Case Sensitive.

4. You can see the robots.txt of any website by putting robots.txt in front of its domain name – https://xyz.com/robots.txt

5. There is no guarantee that any robot will accept the instructions given in this file or not.

Although large search engine companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex follow these instructions, small search engines and data aggregators do not follow these instructions.

Now we have learned a lot about robots.txt and now we see what happens in this file and how to use robots.txt for SEO.

How To Use Robots.Txt File

This is the minimum content of the robots.txt –

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Take a look at it, this is how it happens.

If you want to allow all Search Engines to access all the pages of your website, then there should be only this in your robots.txt.

The first line of this robots.txt is User-agent: * This ‘*’ in this means that there is an instruction for all types of Search Engines Bots.

After this there is Disallow in the second line: If there is nothing in front of Disallow, it means that no part of the website is Disallowed or Banned for any kind of Search Engine Robots.

But if there is ‘/’ in front of this Disallow, then it means that all the files in the Root Directory are Disallowed.

Always remember that only after putting ‘/’ in the domain name of any website, we are able to create a link to a page.

Even the home page is index.html or index.php after ‘/’ but it is a different matter that browsers do not show it.

So if you put ‘/’ in front of Disallow, then you are blocking all the files of your website for Search Engine.

These small rules can affect your entire website, which is why it is important for you.

But if you want to block your website only for a particular search engine.

Then the first line of this code is – User-agent: * In this you have to give the username of that search engine instead of ‘*’ like – User-agent: Googlebot and after this you can write your instruction in the following line.

If you want to block your entire website from that search engine, then leave ‘/’ in the second line.

Almost every search engine has a different username or user agent, such as Google’s Googlebot, Yahoo’s Slurp, and Microsoft’s Bingbot.

Now here comes a question how does this robots.txt affect your SEO and what is the benefit of this in SEO, let’s know-

How To Use Robots.Txt For SEO

At present, Google handles more than 98% of web traffic, so here we talk about Google itself.

Google assigns a crawl budget to every website, which determines how many times Google’s robot will visit your website.

This Crawl Visit depends on two things –

1. Slow is not happening while crawling your server. It does not happen that when Google’s robot budget your website, then your website does not become slow for real visitors.

2. This Crawl budget also depends on how popular your website is. Websites that are more popular and on which more content is available, clearly Google wants to visit such websites frequently so that it can keep itself updated with the content.

So if you want your website to make good use of Google’s Crawl budget, then you can block Unimportant pages from your website’s robots.txt.

Such as a Login Page, folder or page with Documents of Internal Use, and pages with old or duplicate content.

By Disallowing all these Unimportant Pages for Googlebot, you can save your Crawl budget for your Important Pages.

With Robots.txt, you can also prevent the under-maintenance part of your website from being indexed temporarily.

If there is such a part in your website which is only for your Employees and that you do not want to be shown publicly in the search, you can also block it in your Robots.txt.

Suppose your website is xyz.com and inside it, there is a folder sample and it has a page sample.html then to hide all the files in this sample folder you have to enter the code shown below in robots.txt.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /sample

And to hide sample.html we will use this code –

User-agent: *

Disallow: /sample.html

Other Benefits Of robots.txt Files

Apart from this, you can also link Search Robots to your Sitemap in the robots.txt and you must do so.

You must add a link to your Sitemap in your robots.txt. For this, you just have to add this line in your robots.txt –

Sitemap: https://xyz.com/sitemap.xml

I told you a few steps earlier how your website can be slow for real visitors while crawling robots of a search engine.

In such a situation, if your website attracts very unique user traffic, then it can cost you the slow speed of your website and for this, you can also put a Delay-Timer in your robots.txt, so that Search Engines Robots a page.

After crawling, you will wait for some time before crawling another page.

This Wait Time or Delay, by default, is set in milliseconds.

For this, you have to put this code in your robots.txt –

Crawl-delay: 10

Here this 10 means that the robots will wait for 10 milliseconds before crawling the second page, which will give some rest to your server, and your website will not slow down at once.

You can set this number of milliseconds according to your own.

On July 2, 2019, Google has also announced that no index request in robots.txt will be accepted by Google.

On this Announcement of Google, Microsoft Bing gave a reaction that we never used to follow.

You always have to keep in mind that No Index is caused by Disallow.

The Disallow command gives instructions not to crawl the page and the No Index command does not refuse to crawl the page but rather refuses to index it.

There was no written rule of No Index till now but till a few years ago Google was following it in 90% of the cases now Google has abolished this No Index rule so if there is no Index command in its robots.txt.

If you put it, maybe Google may not follow it.

Friends, hope you must have got to learn something unique about how to use robots text for SEO from this article.

Friends, while moving this content toward the end, I would like to show you the robots.txt of some top websites –

First of all, we will look at the robots.txt of Facebook.com which is shown below, in which if you look carefully, they have given a warning message in the first line itself. Facebook has a long list of robots.txt.

Below you are shown the robots.txt of Google.com –

The most bizarre robots.txt is that of Paytm, in which a total of 5626 lines are present –

Conclusion

In this article, we are clearly discussing what is robots.txt file.

The presented article will help you to maintain and use the robots.txt of you and your client properly.

Along with this, also remember that this file is very important for your website or blog and any improper change made in it can harm your entire website.

In this article, we mainly had only one scope, How to use robots txt for SEO and you must have got to learn in this.

If you find this information useful, then definitely share it with needy people and if there is any such point about robots.txt files which we have not been able to cover in this article, then you must share it through the comment section.

FAQ

How to create a robots.txt file in SEO?

robots.txt file is a plain text file. To see the robots.txt file of any website, you can put robots.txt in front of its URL like – https:/ example.com/ robots.txt
• To create a robots.txt file, first of all, create a file whose name you will enter robots.txt. You can create this file on Notepad in your system.
• After this, put the rules of your robots.txt in it.
• Now upload this file to the Root Directory in File Manager in your Cpanel or Control Panel. Keep in mind that you do not upload it in any sub-directory.
• After this you can see that domain name by putting robots.txt in front of it.

Is robots.txt a vulnerability?

robots.txt by itself never introduces security vulnerability, even though it is often used to identify private and restricted areas of a website.

When should I use robots.txt?

The robots.txt file contains instructions for bots for Search Engines that tell them which web pages they want to visit and which ones they don’t. robots.txt files are most relevant to web crawlers of search engines like Google.

SEO Sunny Grewal