One major element that can seriously impact the SEO performance of any website is robots.txt. We all have a huge amount of content on our websites, but we have to consider which is much more representative. If you are an SEO executive, then you have landed just on the right piece of article as here we will help you to understand the robots.txt files which are developed for this sole purpose. Through robot.txt, you will be able to guide search engine crawlers to guide what are the crucial spots of your website. If not used correctly than it could hurt the ranking. Here, as we move forward in this technical guide we will help you to analyse the intricacies of the files of robots.txt and how they perform.
All the essential details such as:
- Meaning of robots.txt
- The Way It Affects Your Website SEO
- Process of creating robots.txt
- Submission of this function
These points will be covered here in detail. So that, you will be able to get a better understanding of the configuration of the robots.txt file.
What Is The Meaning Of Robots.txt File And How Does It Affect The Site?
Robots.txt is a file that is located on your web server that will provide different instructions to the engine crawlers of the search engine to help it allow and disallow what content should be scanned by it. This search engine crawler primarily belongs to Google and it can help you to access and index the pages of your desire.
Benefits Of The Robots.Txt File For The Web
Let us try to understand the benefits of this file to widen the horizon of our understanding concerning the essential role played by robots.txt:
- Bottom Line Pages Will Be Prioritized: Directing Search Engine will become easily possible to MVP(Most Valued Pages) of your website. In this way, you will be able to ensure that only the indexing of your page happens which does matter to you the most.
- All of the large files which might be present on your website could prevent Google to rank your website. This will create a negative impact on Googlebot. So, with the robot.txt you will be able to avoid such a situation.
- Resources is a valuable asset that must be preserved. Thus, utilising the application of robots.txt will help you to work on the important content in a better fashion.
- You will be able to save the crawl budget and prevent search engines from wasting any important content and resources on your website.
- In this way, you will be able to allocate better resources with the simple use of the robot.txt extension for your prominent priority pages.
Impact That Robots.txt File Have On Search Engine Optimisation
Now, after having an in-depth knowledge about the benefits of the robot.txt file now is the time where you should know its impact. Utilising this resource in the correct amount is the key to excelling in your ranking manifolds. If you went on to implement robot.txt on every page then there are high chance that you might get a soft 404 error on the site. Along with this, it can create a situation where your website will be crawled at a much slower pace. This will eventually lead to a decrease in the capacity of crawling within your website.
In case you have inserted a lot of robot.txt on different pages then it will certainly be a waste of money on the crawl budget. Now, you might be wondering what is the crawl budget. The crawl budget directly corresponds to the total number of pages that re being crawled by the crawler of Googlebot. The overall impact that this function has on SEO is immense and you should have a thorough understanding of what are the important sections that require indexing.
The art of blocking certain pages from getting indexed will surely enhance the quality of the search engine to a great extent. In this way, you will never hurt your ranking in any way and get the best possible outcome. You can also understand some of the following examples:
- Getting your recent articles indexed will provide you with much more surplus than investing in this function for hundreds of posts within the website.
- In case you have an eCommerce website instead of indexing all of your product pages, you should allow only some of them to pass through the indexing category.
In this way, Googlebot can help you extensively in indexing the website which will be fruitfuyl for the improvement of your website in the overall ranking.
Getting A Know-How Of The Practices Of Robot.txt That Will Boost Your SEO Incredibly
Now, we have discovered the impact and the benefits of robot.txt but now is the time where we will help you to know some of the major practices that can make the quality of the performance of your SEO magnificent. There are certain things that you should know to make this file as productive for you as possible. Let us jump right into them to learn in a much better light about the functionality and productivity of the Robot.txt files:
Implementation of New Line For Better Direction
This is a crucial practice that you should use a new line for every directive of the robots.txt file so that it will help you not create any kind of confusion as far as the search engine crawlers are concerned. In this way, you will be able to allow and disallow different rules.
Some of the examples disallow rules are mentioned below:
Disallow: /blog/ or Disallow: /contact/
Utilising The Instructions To Make Them Use As Wildcards
Wildcards are some of the instructions that are widely used by the SEO community in order to block innumerable pages that might cause a lot of time waste for the crawler. One of the popular wildcards that is commonly used is “(*) asterisk”.
Let us try to understand this by an example:
If yoru are willing to close all of the files that have an extension of .jpg than you can use the command:
Disallow: /*.jpg
Errors Made At The Time Of Implementation Of Robots.txt
Now, we have learnt a great deal about the Robots.txt function but there are some common error that people tend to make while using them. For this reason, we will try to inform you some of the basic mistakes that you might face as far as this function is taken into consideration:
Missing the File Of Robots.txt Throughout The Program
If you forget to put this function in your file then certainly it is the biggest mistake. Without this function, all of the files will be accessed by the Googlebot and it will impact the ranking miserably for the complete website. Due to this reason, we firmly advise you to never forget the proper usage of robots.txt file. In case you do not have any robots.txt file within the ambit of the root directory then it will not be possible for search engines to crawl through your website. Due to this reason, the crawler will go through your complete website
The Sitemap URL must not be omitted
The Robot.txt file must be included in your website’s sitemap. This will help for the crawling of the search engine and indexing your page thoroughly. Omitting, Robot.txt is one of the major mistakes while writing the SEO of the website.
