What Are Robots.Txt Files?

A robots.txt file is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) and will inform search engines which of your URLs they can use to access your website. Essentially, it is a list of instructions created by webmasters to guide search engine bots on just how to crawl their website, highlighting which pages need to be indexed and which ones they can avoid. You’ll find robots.txt files in the website’s root domain. It is possible to edit your robots.txt file.

Every robots.txt file is a plain text file – this follows the Robots Exclusion Standard – that contains at least 1 blog of directives or rules (it can contain more), a specified user-agent (a search engine bot), and either an allow or disallow instruction.

What Does Robots.txt Disallow Mean?

A term you may come across when looking into your robots.txt is disallow. When you add this to your file, you are telling the bots to stay away from a certain page. If you disallow all robots to your site, you do risk your site being removed from the search engines altogether, so you must be careful about what you are entering. If you get removed, it means any traffic will be wiped, and you could see a drop in revenue because of it. The alternative to disallowing is allowing, so use this where you can to ensure you don’t lose your current position on the search results pages.

What Is Robots.txt Used For?

When you don’t want certain pages found by the public or search engines, or you want to cut back on your crawl budget, you can use robots.txt files. You should not view this as a way to block Googlebots from accessing certain pages. The reason for a robots.txt file is to avoid site overload regarding requests.

What Is A Robots.txt Checker?

Not all websites need robots.txt files, as Google is pretty good at finding the most important pages, but it is still important to look into this. A robots.txt checker tool lets you see if you have one in place and, if so, whether it is blocking web crawlers from the URLs you don’t want them to access. You will require a reliable checker to do this – we have just the perfect one for you right here. Using the tool, you have to simply upload the URL you want to check, and it will verify whether you have properly blocked it.

What Is A Search Engine Bot?

A robots.txt file is about preventing search bots from accessing certain pages, but just what are they? A search engine bot, also known as a web crawler or spider, has one main goal: to learn what your webpage is about. The act of crawling your website is them assessing it and obtaining the data they need to index it. They will follow the instructions as set about in your robots.txt file, either avoiding a page or crawling it as normal. Most of these will follow these rules, but malicious spiders will not. You should use a reliable antivirus and pay attention to phishing emails to prevent these malicious spiders from crawling your site and stealing your data.