What is a Robots.txt File?

Robots.txt is a file representing the regions of the website where search engine robots are prohibited from crawling. It lists the URLs that the webmaster does not wish to index to Google or another search engine and prohibits them from accessing and monitoring the chosen sites. 

When a bot locates a website on the Internet, the first thing it does is search the robots.txt file and find out what it is allowed to access and what it wants to ignore during the crawl.

These tags are required to direct the Google bots to locate a new website. They are important because they are:

– They help maximize the budget for the crawl, as the spider can just visit what’s really important and make more use of the time they’re crawling a website. An example of a website that you wouldn’t want Google to discover is a “thank you” page. 

– The Robots.txt file is a good way to compel page indexing by pointing out pages. 

– Robots.txt files monitor the connection of the crawler to some parts of the web. 

– They can keep whole parts of the website safe, since you can build individual robots.txt files per root domain. A good example, you guessed it, is the payment information tab, of course. 

– You can even block the display of the internal search results pages on the SERPs. 

– Robots.txt will conceal files that are not to be indexed, such as PDFs or other images.

Robots.txt files are public files. You should simply type a root domain and add/robots.txt to the end of the URL, and you’ll see a file if there’s one!

Warning: stop mentioning any private information in this file. 

You will find and edit the file in the root directory of your hosting, search the admin or FTP files of your website. 

You should do it yourself 

– Build or edit a plain text editor file

– Call the file “robots.txt” without any difference, such as the use of capital letters. 

It’s expected to look like this if you want the web to crawl: 

– Note that we left “Disallow” flat, which means that nothing is allowed to crawl. 

If you want to block a page, then add it (with the illustration “Thank you page”): 

Basic blocking for all bots and crawlers. Problems due to resource blocking in GWT

Dynamic URL blocking

Search blocking

Trackback blocking

Feed blocking for crawlers

To slow down some bots that tend to go crazy

Blocking bots and unhelpful crawlers

Prevents problems of blocked resources in Google Webmaster Tools

Use the separate file robots.txt for each subdomain. 

Put the file in the top-level directory of the website. 

You should use Google Webmaster to verify the robots.txt files before adding them to your root directory.