All About robots.txt Files

Have you ever heard of the term robot.txt file? Most websites should have it, but many people might’ve not heard of it. They are part of the robots exclusion protocol(REP) and are directions to instruct web bots on what they can and can’t crawl on your site. It is important that you have one properly written. Here’s some information you should know.

A robot.txt file will have the words “allow” or “disallow followed by a user-agent. ”These user agents are the names of the bots/search engines for which the instructions are for. An example of a user-agent is Googlebot. Allow/disallow is pretty self-explanatory; it simply tells the bot if they can or can’t crawl that specific URL. Another factor in this file can be a crawl-delay which tells the bot how long to wait to crawl. This is a command that Googlebot doesn’t follow.

I will say this can get complicated, and I can continue with information on this, but here’s a few more things to remember. The title is case-sensitive, so make sure it’s written as “robots.txt.” Be mindful of the placement of the file. It is public- any file can be found if it exists by typing robots.txt at the end of any root domain. Sometimes malicious bots will ignore the instructions. And having a robot.txt file written properly will help control the indexation you want for your site. It will eliminate duplicate content and keep sections private.

I hope you learned a little from this. Remember, this is technical SEO, so it’s a pretty complicated type of SEO. Don’t panic if you can’t learn all of this. Take it step by step when trying to learn about these files. If you’d like to look more into your robot.txt file, please reach out to bayrockdigitalmarketing.com.