How to create and submit SEO friendly robots.txt file?
Do you know what the robots.txt file is? And How to create and submit SEO-friendly robots.txt Files for the website? And how important is this file for SEO? I will discuss here these points.
If you are blogging, you must know about this important file, otherwise knowingly or unknowingly this can cause a lot of problems to your website. Some URLs of your website will be indexed in search engines. Most of them rely on this Robots.txt file.
If you make a mistake while creating or updating this important file, your entire website may be removed from the search engine or the content that you do not want to show in the search engine may be indexed.
So in today's post, I will give you information about what is robots.txt File is in blogging? And how important is it to create a perfect Robots.txt file? If you read this post carefully to the end, you will understand this term of blogging better.
What is the robots.txt file?
Robots.txt File is a .txt file located in the Root Folder of your website's web hosting. You can check through https://example.com/robots.txt
The robots.txt file manages the indexing rules of the website in such a way that it can create different rules for different file paths. Each rule prevents crawlers from crawling a specific file path or allows
It is very important to keep this file in the right place because if you keep it separate from the root directory of the website, it may be very difficult for search engine crawlers to find it which is not very accurate.
When search engine crawlers crawl your website, the first target is the Robots.txt file in the root directory of the website.
This is why it is very important for every website to have this important file so that all search engines like Google, Bing, etc. can give the right direction for crawling and only the content that you have allowed can be publicly visible in search engines.
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What are the benefits of the Robots.txt File?
- Robots.txt File Search engine crawlers instruct which part of the website to crawl and which part not.
- With the help of this file, you can index and noindex your blog as a category in search engines.
- This helps search engines to quickly understand the indexing structure of your blog.
- With this file, you can prevent all search engines from indexing the blog
- Sometimes there is some content that you do not want to make visible in search engines but if you do not have a Robots.txt file then everything is indexed quickly. In this case, you can delay the indexing of the blog with this file if you want.
- You can add a Sitemap URL to this file to help index the blog's indexable content quickly because crawlers are the first to target the Robots.txt file.
Why is the robots.txt file important in SEO?
According to the information given above, now you must have understood what is Robots.txt File on the website? And what are its benefits? Let's find out now how important this type of .txt file is for website SEO. This file is a very important part of the technical SEO of any website so it is very important to understand it from an SEO point of view.
If you want to make your website SEO-friendly like a search engine, it is very important to create a Robots.txt file so that crawlers can get the right direction to crawl all the content of your website.
Search engine crawlers do not have time to crawl the content of any website if viewed manually but if you submit a sitemap to Google search console then in this case crawling is very fast.
But if you do not configure the Robots.txt file for your website then all the content will be indexed in search engines so that all the content that you do not want to be visible in the search results is not perfect for website SEO so every website Creating a Robots.txt File has become very important.
Where should the Robots.txt File be located?
If you are a WordPress user then ideally the location of the Robots.txt file should be in the root directory of your website so that whenever crawlers come to your website they can easily access this file and crawl the content according to its instructions.
But if you keep this important file elsewhere from your website's root directory, crawlers will not be able to access it and your entire website will be indexed by search engines. https://example.com/robots.txt
Now a text file will open in front of you as you can see in the picture below. This is a Robots.txt file of BengaliTech.info.
And if you see any code like the code given below, it means that this file has been created for the website but this Robots.txt file has not been optimized according to SEO.
User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 10
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Guide to Robots.txt File
1. User agent
This command is used to point to search engine bots/crawlers. It may contain one or more User-agents such as *, Googlebot, AdsBot-Google, Bingbot, etc. If you use * here it means you are all crawlers. Let us understand this with the help of an example.
# Example 1. To block Googlebot
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
# Example 2. To block Googlebot and Adsbot
User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
# Example 3. To Allow All Search Crawlers to Crawl
User-agent: *
Allow: /
2. Disallow
This command is used to prevent search engine bots from crawling. You can see the use of this command in the example above.
3. Allow
This command is used to allow search engine bots to crawl
4. Sitemap
Here you can specify the URL of your website's Sitemap so that crawlers can easily find all the content you want to crawl.
How to use Robots.txt File?
Now a Robots.txt file has been created for your website but it is still an empty file.
For example, if you want to block search engine crawling for your website, you just need to add some permissions to Robots.txt
If you want to hide a specific page of your website from crawlers then you can do it easily
Although robots.txt does not automatically improve the SEO of your website, it is important to use this file to control the behavior of search engine crawling.
To modify this file or do any kind of editing, usually, open it after visiting your cPanel and any changes you want to make to that file will be immediately effective for your website.
Block all bots for websites
If you want to block all of its crawlers from crawling, add this code to the Robots.txt File.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Block Crawler's Crawling for a specific folder
If you do not want Crawlers to access a specific folder on your website, add the following code to the file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: / write_folder_name /
To block certain search engine bots
You should use this code if you want to block certain search engine bots like Googlebot or Bingbot on your website
User-agent: robot name
Disallow: /
Preventing a specific file from crawling
Robots.txt File also allows you to prevent a file from a specific folder from being crawled by search engines. For this, you need to add the following code to that file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder_name/file_name.extension
To block an entire folder but to allow a file
There are times when you do not want to read Crawling to a folder but want to allow one of the files in that folder for search engine crawling, then you can do this very easily with the help of the Robots.txt File.
User-agent: *
Disallow: / folder_name /
Allow: /folder_name/file_name.extension
Last Word
Site ranking depends exclusively on the robots.txt file. You may have published very good quality SEO content, but if you do not create and submit the robots.txt file properly, your post will not appear in Google search. So there is no option to properly create and submit the robots.txt file.
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