Robots.txt is one of the simplest files on a website, robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site.
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website. The robots.txt file is part of the the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users.
Basic format:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
How Robots.txt Work
Search engines send out tiny programs called “spiders” or “robots” to search your site and bring information back to the search engines so that the pages of your site can be indexed in the search results and found by web users.
User-agents
- Crawling the web to discover content
- Indexing that content so that it can be served up to searchers who are looking for information.
To crawl sites, search engines follow links to get from one site to another - ultimately, crawling across many billions of links and websites. This crawling behavior is sometimes known as “spidering.”
But here are some useful ones for SEO:
- Google: Googlebot
- Google Images: Googlebot-Image
- Bing: Bingbot
- Yahoo: Slurp
- Baidu: Baiduspider
- DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckBot
For example, let’s say that you wanted to block all bots except Googlebot from crawling your site. Here’s how you’d do it
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Why do you need robots.txt?
Robots.txt files control crawler access to certain areas of your site. While this can be very dangerous if you accidentally disallow Googlebot from crawling your entire site, there are some situations in which a robots.txt file can be very handy.
For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your thank you page, that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it. Keeping the search engines from accessing certain pages on your site is essential for both the privacy of your site and for your SEO.
- Preventing the crawling of duplicate content;
- Keeping sections of a website private (e.g., your staging site);
- Preventing the crawling of internal search results pages;
- Preventing server overload;
- Preventing Google from wasting “crawl budget.”
- Preventing images, videos, and resources files from appearing in Google search results.
If there are no areas on your site to which you want to control user-agent access, you may not need a robots.txt file at all.
How to check if you have a robots.txt file
Not certain in the event that you have a robots.txt file? Basically type in your root domain, at that point add/robots.txt to the end of the URL. For example, Moz's robots file is situated at moz.com/robots.txt.
Assuming no .txt page shows up, you don't right now have a (live) robots.txt page.
How to create a robots.txt file
If you don’t already have a robots.txt file, creating one is easy. Just open a blank .txt document and begin typing directives. For example, if you wanted to disallow all search engines from crawling your /admin/ directory, it would look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Conclusion
It’s important to update your Robots.txt file if you add pages, files or directories to your site that you don’t wish to be indexed by the search engines or accessed by web users. This will ensure the security of your website and the best possible results with your search engine optimization.
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