What is the Robots.txt file Called and how does it Work?
What is robots.txt file. Have you guys heard about this file? If not, then don’t worry, I am going to give you the full information about robot.txt in this article.
So if you have your own blog or website you have noticed that sometimes when you are posting your blog and you don’t want some information to be public but that happens. Do you guys know why it happens? And Why our some good pages have been not indexed even after a long time? So if we want to know what is the reason behind it then you have to read the full article about robot.txt
Robot metatags are used to tell the search engines which files and folders are to be shown to all public on the website but not all robot metatags can read search engines that are why some of the robot metatags go unnoticed without reading it. for this, there is the best way to use the robot.txt file so that we can invite search engines to our website or blog folder.
Table of Contents
What is Robot .txt
Robot .txt is the text file that you keep on your site so that you can tell to search robots which page need to be visited or crawled or which are not. Although it is not mandatory for a search engine to follow robot.txt they notice it And they do not visit the page and folders which is mentioned in it. according to this robot.txt is very mandatory that’s why it is very important to keep it in the main directory so that search engines can find it easily.
That’s why this small file is important if you will not use it accordingly this can law down your website ranking .you should have good knowledge about this.
Let’s see how its works
Any search engine or web spider visits your website or blog for the first time than they first crawl your robot.txt file because all the information is there in this file related to your website and what not to crawl and which to do. they index your direct pages so that your index pages are displayed in search engine results.
Robot .txt files can be beneficial for you if:
You want the search engine to ignore the duplicate pages on your website
If you want that not be an index of your internal search result pages then
If you want search engines not to index some of your pages then
If you want not to index some of your files like images PDFs etc. then
If you want to give direction to search engines that where is the sitemap then
How to Create Robot .txt file
If you have not created a robot.txt file for your website and blog then you should create it very soon
Because it is going to be very beneficial for your website to make it you have to follow some instructions
First of all, create a text file and save that with the name of robot.txt you can use notepad if you are using window or TextEdit if you use Macs, and then save it according to the text delimited file And now upload that in your root directory of the website which is the root level file and these files are also called docs and that appears after the domain name. If you are using a subdomain then you will have to create a separate robot.txt file.
Let’s see what is the syntax of Robots.txt
We use some syntaxin robots.txt which is very important to know
1.User-agent: those robots that follow all rules in which they are applicable (eg.” Googlebot,” etc)
- Disallow: To use this means that block those pages from bots those you don’t want anyone else other can access (it is necessary to write disallow before all files.)
- Noindex: To use this index search engines will not index those pages that you don want to index
- you should use a blank line to separate all user-agent/disallow groups but here make sure there should not be a blank line in
between the two groups (there should not be any gap in between the user-agent line and the last disallow) - A hash symbol(#) can be used to give comments within a robot.txt file where ever everything starting with the#symbol will be ignored .these specially used for whole lines or end of lines.
- Directories and filenames are cases sensitive:” private,” and “PRIVATE” all these search engines are different. let’s understand with the help of an example
Here is the robot “Googlebot” in that there is no disallowed statement and this is free to go anywhere.
Here all sites had been closed where “msnbot” is used
Advantages of using Robot.Txt
Well, there are lots of advantages when you are using robot.txt but I am sharing some important things that everyone should be aware of.
Your sensitive information will be private with the use of robot.txt
Canonicalization problems can be kept away with the use of robot.txt or you can be kept multiple canonical URLs and this problem is also called the “duplicate content” problem.
With this, you can also help Google bots to index the page.