What is Robots.txt? How to optimize it for your SEO?

 

The robots.txt file is one of the first things you should check and improve when working on technical SEO. An issue or misconfiguration in your robots.txt file can cause serious SEO issues, affecting your rankings and traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves big and small website modifications. The robots.txt file may appear to be a relatively minor SEO element, but it can have a significant impact on your site’s accessibility and rankings.

In this blog post, you will discover what a robots.txt file is, why you need one, how to SEO optimize it, and how to ensure that search engines can enter it without issue.

What is the Robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file is a command that instructs search engine robots or crawlers on how to navigate a website. Directives serve as orders in the crawling and indexing methods, directing search engine bots such as Googlebot to the adequate pages.

Robots.txt files, which reside in the root directory of sites, are also classified as plain text files. If your domain is “www.robotsrock.com,” your robots.txt file is located at “www.robotsrock.com/robots.txt.” Robots.txt files serve two purposes for bots:

  • Block crawling of a URL path. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is not the same as no index robots.txt meta directives, which prevent pages from being indexed.
  • Allow crawling through a specific page or subfolder if crawling into its parent has been disabled.

Robots.txt files are more like suggestions for bots than hard and fast rules — and your pages may still be indexed and appear in search results for specific keywords. The files primarily manage the frequency and intensity of crawling and control the strain on your server. The file identifies user agents, which either refers to a particular search engine bot or expands the order to all bots.

For example, if you only want Google to crawl pages and not Bing, you can send them instructions as the user-agent. With robots.txt, web developers or operators can prevent bots from crawling specific pages or sections of a site.

Click to Read More:  https://suitejar.com/blog/what-is-robots-txt/

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