What is a robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a simple text file in your website's root directory. It instructs search engine crawlers on which pages of your website to crawl. The robots exclusion standard explained later in this article, is the foundation for valid instructions. These instructions come in the form of User-Agent and Disallow. The combination of User-Agent and Disallow tells search engine crawlers which URLs they are not permitted to crawl on your website. A robots.txt file with only User-Agent: * Disallow: / is entirely legal. The instructions given to crawlers in this scenario are to prevent the complete site from being crawled. Crawlers visit your website and add URLs to the crawl queue. They do this for freshly found as well as already known URLs. A snail will first seek your website's root directory for the robots.txt file. They will crawl your entire site if it is not present. If a robots.txt file exists, it will crawl your website according to the directives you set. The primary reason for updating and maintaining a robots.txt file for your website is to keep it from clogging with too many crawler requests. Robots.txt is not a means to prevent Google from indexing your content. A popular misconception is that robots.txt directives can be used to prevent pages from appearing in Google search results. Google can still index your content if additional indications exist, such as links from other websites. A misconfigured robots.txt file might have significant effects on your website. Instructing crawlers not to view your pages by mistake can be costly. Huge websites exacerbate this issue. You may unintentionally restrict crawlers from accessing significant chunks of critical pages. Furthermore, it is unclear whether all search engine crawlers will follow the instructions in your robots.txt file. The majority of reputable snails will not crawl pages that have been blocked by robots.txt. Some malicious bots, though, may disregard it. As a result, don't utilize robots.txt to protect essential pages on your website.

Use of robots.txt

Before exploring the URLs on your website, search engine crawlers will examine your robots.txt file. If there are specific pages or areas of your site that you do not want to be crawled, such as pages that are not useful to be included in search engine results pages, robots.txt can be used to prevent them from crawling. The most crucial purpose for including and maintaining a robots.txt file is to optimize the crawl budget. Crawl budget refers to how much time and resources search engine crawlers will spend on your site. The problem you're attempting to solve is when crawlers squander the crawl budget by crawling irrelevant or undesirable pages on your website. Breaking the Myth: Using Robots.txt to prevent indexing Robots.txt is an untrustworthy tool for preventing search engines from indexing pages. Even if crawling is disabled in robots.txt, runners can still be indexed in search results. If crawling is disabled in your robots.txt file, it will not display a descriptive search results snippet explaining the index page. Instead, it will display a message informing the user that the description is unavailable due to the robots.txt command.

A meta tag can be used to prevent indexing.

The majority of search engine crawlers will respect the noindex meta element. Some nefarious crawlers and bots may still disobey this directive. Thus, additional safeguards may be required. However, we are primarily concerned about legitimate search engine crawlers and bots, and we are convinced that they will follow this guideline precisely as written. Placing a noindex meta tag in your page's header will prohibit crawlers from crawling that page. By inserting the following code into your page's title, you can prevent all robots from indexing it:

With an HTTP response header, you can avoid indexing.

An HTTP response header is a more advanced method of preventing genuine search engine crawlers from indexing your content by including the X-Robots-Tag. You can set the htaccess file of an Apache-based web server to return the HTTP response for your sites.

X-Robots-Tag in the. htaccess file

You will need to make changes to your web servers—access file. Your Apache web server reads this file to respond to the request with an HTTP response header. Depending on your web server configuration, utilizing X-Robots-Tag may appear like this:

What exactly is a robots.txt file?

Because only some websites contain a robots.txt file by default, you may need to create one if you still need to create one. You may see whether one already exists by using the browser's navigation bar and inputting the URL for the robots.txt file. Here is the robots.txt file for the StudioHawk website, for example, https://studiohawk.com.au/robots.txt

Robots exclusion standard

The robots exclusion standard allows you to inform search engine crawlers. The measure includes methods for telling crawlers which parts of your site they should and should not crawl. As a result, your robots.txt file should consist of a list of your most critical instructions. Not all crawlers or robots follow the guidelines in your robots.txt file. These crawlers are commonly referred to as BadBots. These include robots searching for security flaws that may allow them to crawl or scan in areas you have designated as off-limits to robots. Spambots, spyware, and email harvesters are examples of common BadBots. We will concentrate on the kind of instructions we can provide to search engine crawlers and how we can assist them in crawling the portions of our site that we want them to. The foundations of this are accomplished by combining User-Agent and Disallow.

Disallow

Disabling this instructs a User-Agent not to crawl specific areas of your site. To be legitimate, you must include a specifier following the term Disallow.

An example of how to prevent all crawlers:

Allow: / User-agent: *

We utilize an asterisk to denote all User-Agents and a forward slash to mark the beginning of all URLs.

To prevent Googlebot from crawling the /photos directory, use the following example:

Googlebot is the default user agent.

/photos are not permitted.

More specifically, an example Allow Googlebot, followed by all other crawlers:

Googlebot serves as the user agent.                

Allow: /disallow-Googlebot/

* User-agent                        

Allow: /keep-the-rest-out/

Exclusion instructions for non-standard robots

You can use non-standard directives in addition to the regular demands User-Agent and Disallow. Please remember that there is no assurance that all search engine crawlers will follow these non-standard directives. However, these are very stable for significant search engines.

Allow

Allow is supported by major search engine crawlers and might be helpful when combined with a Disallow directive. This directive allows crawlers to access a file within a message that may have a Disallow on the directory. We need to use some special syntax to guarantee that the leading search engine crawlers follow the Allow directive. Make sure your Allow demands are on the line above the Disallow directive. Allowing a file within a directory with a Disallow: Allow: /directory/somefile.html /guide/ is not permitted.

Crawl-delay

All of the leading search engine crawlers do not support crawl delay. It is used to limit the crawler's speed. This is typically utilized when your website's performance is degraded due to excessive crawler activity. Poor site performance, on the other hand, is usually caused by insufficient web hosting and should be remedied by upgrading your hosting. Conversely, Google does not respect Crawl-rate and will disregard this directive if it is present in your robots.txt file. If you wish to rate-limit Googlebot crawler, go to the Google Search Console Old version and make the necessary changes.