Optimize Your Website with a Robots.txt File In 5 Steps

Optimize Your Website with a Robots.txt File In 5 Steps

Search engine crawlers tirelessly scour the web, gathering information to power search results and other applications. Sometimes, you might want to keep certain pages off search engines. Maybe you're working on a development project or want to control access to specific areas of your site. This is where the robots.txt file comes in. Once you set it up, crawlers will know what information they can and cannot collect from your website.

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file is a simple text file located at the root of your website that controls how search engine crawlers access your pages. It acts like a set of instructions, telling crawlers which parts of your site they can visit and which ones they should avoid. By default, crawlers are allowed to access everything on your website, but you can use the robots.txt file to limit this access.

Why use a robots.txt file?

There are a few reasons you might want to use a robots.txt file:

• Prevent crawling of unimportant content: You can block crawlers from accessing areas of your site that don't add value to search results, such as login pages or administrative directories. This helps search engines focus on the important content on your site.
• Reduce server load: If your site has a lot of pages or complex content, crawling can put a strain on your server. Blocking crawlers from accessing certain areas can help improve your website's performance.

Important things to know:

• Your website can only have one robots.txt file.
• Robots.txt doesn't prevent your pages from being indexed by search engines. It only controls how crawlers access them. If you want to completely remove a page from search results, you'll need to use a different method.

Setting Up of robots.txt file.

1. Create the File: Use a plain text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit) to create a new file named "robots.txt". Don't use a word processor, as they may add extra formatting that can mess things up.

2. Upload the File: You'll need to upload the file to the root directory of your website. This is the main folder where all your website's files reside.

   If you're not sure how to access your root directory, your web hosting provider can help.

3. Add Rules: While the robots.txt file is created by default, it's empty unless you add specific instructions for search engines. These instructions are written in a format the search engines understand.
4. Reminder: Never place robots.txt file in the sub-directory of your domain (Wrong: technishala.com/page/robots.txt | Right: technishala.com/robots.txt)

You can learn more about how to write these instructions in the next steps.

Tell the crawlers who you are talking to:

In creating a robots.txt file, you define which web crawlers (like search engines) can access different parts of your website. This is done using user-agents. User-agent refers to the software that visits your site. Here are some common crawlers and the search engines they represent:

You can define user-agents in three different ways inside your robots.txt file.

Syntax for creating User-Agent

The syntax that is use to set the user agent is user-agent: Name of bot. For ex-
user-agent: Googlebot

In the same way you can allow more than one user-agent to crawl the website. For ex-

user-agent: Googlebot
user-agent: Facebot

Setting All Crawlers as the User-agent

If you want to allow all the crawlers available to crawl your website then write the syntax in the form given below: user-agent:*

A robots.txt file is like a set of instructions for web crawlers (like those used by search engines). It's divided into sections, and each section focuses on a specific crawler identified by a "user-agent". For each crawler, there can be one or more rules that tell it what parts of the website it can or can't access.