Robots.txt Generator: How to Create the Perfect Robots.txt File for SEO
The robots.txt file also referred to as the robot’s exclusion protocol or standard, maybe a document that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl.
Robots.txt may be a document webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically program robots) on the way to crawl pages on their websites. The robots.txt file is a component of the robots exclusion protocol (REP),
a bunch of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the online, access, and index content, and serve that content up to users.
The REP also includes directives like meta robots, also as page-, subdirectory-, or site-wide instructions for a way search engines should treat links (such as “follow” or “nofollow”).
Why is the robots.txt file important?
First, let’s take a glance at why the robots.txt file matters within the first place.
The robots.txt file also referred to as the robot’s exclusion protocol or standard, maybe a document that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl.
It also tells web robots which pages to not crawl.
Let’s say a search engine is close to visit a site. Before it visits the target page, it’ll check the robots.txt for instructions.
There are differing types of robots.txt files, so let’s check out a couple of different samples of what they appear like.
Basic format:
User-agent: [user-agent name]Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]
This is the basic skeleton of a robots.txt file.
Together, these two lines are considered a complete robots.txt file — though one robots file can contain multiple lines of user agents and directives (i.e., disallows, allows, crawl-delays, etc.).
How does robots.txt work?
Search engines have two main jobs:
- Crawling the web to discover content;
- Indexing that content so that it can be served up to searchers who are looking for information.
To crawl sites, search engines follow links to urge from one site to a different — ultimately, crawling across many billions of links and websites. This crawling behavior is usually referred to as “spidering.”
After arriving at an internet site but before spidering it, the search crawler will search for a robots.txt file. If it finds one, the crawler will read that file first before continuing through the page.
Because the robots.txt file contains information about how the program should crawl, the knowledge found there’ll instruct further crawler action on this particular site.
If the robots.txt file doesn’t contain any directives that disallow a user-agent’s activity (or if the location doesn’t have a robots.txt file), it’ll proceed to crawl other information on the location.