Understanding Robots.txt: The Gatekeeper of Your Website 😎
The robots.txt file is one of the most useful but often ignored tools for managing a website. However, what is robots.txt exactly, why is it important, and how should it be used?
Robots.txt?
A simple text file called Robots.txt can be located in the root directory of your website. Communicating with web crawlers i.e. automated programs which search engines use to find and index webpages is the main goal of it.
Certain pages of your website are accessible to these crawlers or not, based on the data provided in the robots.txt file.
Why Robots.txt Is Important?
Controlling Search Engine Crawling:
It's not necessary for search engines to crawl and index every single page on your website. You may protect these sections from being crawled by using Robots.txt, which can help protect private data from accidental public view.
Optimizing Crawl Budget:
Every website is given a "crawl budget" by engines like Google, which defines how many pages they will crawl and index in a specific period of time. You can help search engines in focusing on the most essential content and increase the efficiency of the crawling process by using robots.txt to block irrelevant or low-value pages..
Enhancing Site Performance:
Robots.txt helps in a decrease of unnecessary server load by specifying what bots can and cannot access. Faster load speeds and improved website performance are results that are helpful to SEO and user experience.
How to Create and Use Robots.txt:
Making a robots.txt file is really simple. All you have to do is create a text file using any text editor.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/
which means
User-agent: * means the rules apply to all web crawlers.
Disallow: /admin/ access any pages in the /admin/ directory.
Disallow: /private/ blocks access to the /private/ directory.
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