What is Robots txt?
For those who aren’t already aware, robots txt is a text file that you can put on your website to tell search robots the pages that you don’t want them to visit during their web crawl. Generally, search engines obey what you tell them not to do, so it is almost like putting a ‘do not enter’ sign on those specific pages. You should note, however, that robots.txt doesn’t prevent search engines from crawling your site, so if you have information that you really don’t want anyone seeing, it’s best to keep it offline and on a separate machine.
Why Do You Need it?
You may be wondering why you wouldn’t want search robots visiting some of your pages since it helps improve your ranking in search engines. However, there are a few valid reasons why you wouldn’t want them to. Some of them would probably include:
- To avoid duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control. penalties if you have two versions of a page (e., one for print and one for browser viewing).
- If you have sensitive data you don’t want everyone seeing.
- Wanting to save bandwidth by omitting images, stylesheets, and javascriptJavascript is one of the web’s key programming languages but coding it incorrectly can cost you in technical SEO terms. In order to avoid common mistakes, and understand how Java operates, here’s a quick guide to coding Java the right way. from indexing.
Where Does it Go?
As well as learning about robot.txt, you’re probably here because you want to know how to use it for your personal site as well. Firstly, you should know that robot.txt should always go in the main directory. If you make the mistake of putting them somewhere else, search engines won’t be able to find it and will end up indexing your entire site which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. If you want to know how to write robots txt, then there are many support pages, such as Google, that will allow you to write or edit any robots text file for your site.
Things to Avoid
When adding a robots.txt file to your site, it is important that you do so carefully, as they often have traps. One thing in particular to avoid is allowing different search engines access to different directories as this can create problems. Below you will find some specific mistakes to try and avoid when it comes to robot.txt.
- Contradicting directives.
- Misspelled user agents.
- Missing colons after user-agent and disallow.
It is worth noting that there are tools available to help with typos as trying to find them manually can be quite tricky, such as the Robots.txt Validator tool.
Robots.txt is a great way to prevent all of your pages from becoming visible on the web. This may give you peace of mind knowing that on the internet, you still have access to a level of privacy. However, as mentioned above, if you have extremely sensitive information, keeping it off the web entirely may be a better alternative.
