If this were the case, you could use robots.txt to block these pages from search engine crawlers. Or you may have website login pages you don’t want showing up in SERPs. Sometimes you have pages on your site that you don’t want indexing.įor example, you might be developing a new website on a staging environment that you want to be sure is hidden from users until launch. That’s because Google can usually find and index all of the essential pages on a site.Īnd, they’ll automatically NOT index duplicate content or pages that are unimportant.īut still, there’s no good reason not to have a robots.txt file – so I recommend you have one.Ī robots.txt gives you greater control over what search engines can and can’t crawl on your website, and that’s helpful for several reasons: Allows Non-Public Pages to be Blocked from Search Engines Having a robots.txt file isn’t critical for a lot of websites, especially tiny ones. Google tends to obey the instructions in a robots.txt file. Thankfully, Google isn’t one of those search engines. Should they wish, search engines can choose to ignore your robots.txt file. If there are no directives – or no robots.txt file – search engines will crawl the entire website, private pages, and all.Īlthough most search engines are obedient, it’s important to note that abiding by robots.txt directives is optional. These instructions are known as directives. The robots.txt gets checked regularly by every major search engine (including Google, Bing, and Yahoo) for instructions about how they should crawl the website. That said, robots.txt is used primarily as a “code of conduct” to control the activity of search engine robots (AKA web crawlers). It informs bots of all types, which sections of a site they should (and should not) crawl. In simple terms, a robots.txt file is an instructional manual for web robots. What is a Robots.txt file? And, Why You Need One How to audit your robots.txt for errors.Specifically, I’ll show you how to use robots exclusion protocols to block bots from particular pages, increase crawl frequency, optimize crawl budget, and ultimately get more of the right page’s ranking in SERPs. Today you’re going to learn how to create one of the most critical files for a website’s SEO:
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