Robots.txt for SEO: Your Complete Guide
What is robots.txt and why is it important for search engine optimization (SEO)? Robots.txt is a set of optional directives that tell web crawlers which parts of your website they can access. Most search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, support and use robot txt to identify which web pages to crawl, index and display in search results.
f you’re having issues getting your website indexed by search engines, your robots.txt file may be the problem. Robot.txt errors are among the most common technical SEO issues that appear on SEO audit reports and cause a massive drop in search rankings. Even seasoned technical SEO services providers and web developers are susceptible to committing robot.txt errors.
As such, it is important that you understand two things: 1) what is robots.txt and 2) how to use robots.txt in WordPress and other content management systems (CMS). This will help you create a robots.txt file that is optimized for SEO and make it easier for web spiders to crawl and index your web pages.
In this guide, we cover:
• What Is Robots.txt?
• What Is a Web Crawler and How Does It Work?
• What Does Robot Txt Look Like?
• What Is Robots.txt Used For?
• WordPress Robots.txt Location
• Where Is Robots.txt in WordPress?
• How To Find Robots.txt in cPanel
• How To Find Magento Robots.txt
• Robots Txt Best Practices
Let’s dive deep into the basics of robots.txt. Read on and discover how you can leverage the robots.txt file to improve your website’s crawlability and indexability.
What Is Robots.txt?
Robots txt, also known as the robots exclusion standard or protocol, is a text file located in the root or main directory of your website. It serves as an instruction for SEO spiders on which parts of your website they can and cannot crawl.
Robots.Text Timeline
The robot txt file is a standard proposed by Allweb creator Martijn Koster to regulate how different search engine bots and web crawlers access web content. Here’s an overview of the robots txt file development over the years:
In 1994, Koster created a web spider that caused malicious attacks on his servers. To protect websites from bad SEO crawlers, Koster developed the robot.text to guide search bots to the right pages and hinder them from reaching certain areas of a website.
In 1997, an internet draft was created to specify web robots control methods using a robot txt file. Since then, robot.txt has been used to restrict or channel a spider robot to select parts of a website.
On July 1, 2019, Google announced that it is working towards formalizing the robots exclusion protocol (REP) specifications and making it a web standard – 25 years after robots txt file was created and adopted by search engines.
The goal was to detail unspecified scenarios for robots txt parsing and matching to adapt to the modern web standards. This internet draft indicates that:
1. Any Uniform Resource Identifier-based (URI) transfer protocol, such as HTTP, Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), can use robots txt.
2. Web developers must parse at least the first 500 kibibytes of a robot.text to alleviate unnecessary strain on servers.
3. Robots.txt SEO content is generally cached for up to 24 hours to provide website owners and web developers enough time to update their robot txt file.
4. Disallowed pages are not crawled for a reasonably long period when a robots txt file becomes inaccessible because of server problems.
Several industry efforts have been made over time to extend robots exclusion mechanisms. However, not all web crawlers may support these new robot txt protocols. To clearly understand how robots.text works, let’s first define web crawler and answer an important question: how do web crawlers work?