Following a defined procedure known as the robot exclusion protocol allows search engines to locate the “robots.txt” file that is hosted on a website. In the following, we will discuss in greater depth the robots.txt text file and how it may be utilized to provide instructions to the web crawlers employed by search engines.
This file is very helpful for managing crawl budget and making certain that search engines are spending their time on your site in an effective manner and that they are only crawling the pages that are vital to the site.
The file type need to be plain text that has been encoded with the UTF-8 encoding standard, as Google explains in the robots.txt specifications reference. CR, CR/LF, or LF characters should be used to separate each record (or line) in the file.
The following is a condensed explanation of how it functions:
Crawling
Visits to a website are what kick off the process for search engine bots, which are also referred to as web crawlers or spiders. They begin by requesting the homepage or any other page that can be found by using different methods like as links or sitemaps.
Obtaining the robots.txt file
The “robots.txt” file is what the search engine bot looks for when it accesses a website for the first time. This is accomplished by adding “/robots.txt” to the end of the domain name of the website (for example, www.example.com/robots.txt). In order to retrieve this file, the bot will first issue an HTTP request to the server.
Also Read: Common Robots.txt Issues and How to Fix Them
Reviewing the robots.txt file
The contents of the robots.txt file are analyzed by the search engine bot if the file exists and can be accessed. The bot can be instructed on how to crawl and index the website by reading the instructions provided in the file.
In accordance with the instructions
Specific directives, such as “User-agent” and “Disallow” rules, can be found within the robots.txt file on your computer. The “User-agent” parameter is used to identify the bot to whom the following rules apply.
For example, “Googlebot” refers to the crawler that Google uses. In the “Disallow” section, you can enter a list of URLs or directories that the bot is not permitted to crawl or index.
Also Read: How to Use Robots.txt ?
Indexing according to the guidelines
The robot that operates the search engine adheres to the directives that are contained in the robots.txt file. The URLs and folders that are specified in the “Disallow” rules will not be crawled or indexed by this feature.
On the other hand, if a page is not included in the “Disallow” restrictions, it is still possible for the page to be crawled and indexed.
It is essential to take into consideration the fact that not all bots adhere to the robot exclusion procedure. It’s possible that some people won’t pay attention to the robots.txt file, particularly if they’re hostile or poorly written.
As a consequence of this, one should not place all of their faith in the robots.txt file to keep private or sensitive information hidden, as this is not a foolproof method.
When shouldn’t you use robots.txt?
When applied appropriately, the robots.txt file is a helpful instrument; however, there are situations in which utilizing it is not the optimal answer.
The following are some instances in which you should not use the robots.txt file to control crawling:
Preventing access to Javascript and CSS
In order for search engines to accurately render pages, which is an essential component of keeping strong rankings, they need to have access to all of the resources that are hosted on your website.
Files written in JavaScript that significantly alter the user experience but are blocked from being crawled by search engines can result in penalties being applied either manually or automatically.
Cloaking can occur, for example, if you serve an ad interstitial or reroute users using JavaScript that a search engine is unable to access. If this occurs, the rankings of your content may be modified in accordance with these changes.
Blocking URL parameters
You can restrict URLs that include certain parameters by using the robots.txt file, but this isn’t necessarily the best course of action in every situation.
It is recommended that these be managed within the Google Search Console due to the increased number of parameter-specific options that may be used there to convey preferred crawling strategies to Google.
You might alternatively include the information in a URL fragment (/page#sort=price), which is not crawled by search engines like Google and Bing.
In addition, the rel=nofollow tag might be added to links leading to the URL parameter if it were necessary to use it. This would prohibit web crawlers from attempting to access the parameter.
Preventing access to URLs that contain backlinks
It is possible to prevent link equity from being transferred to the website by using the robots.txt file to disallow URLs.
This indicates that if search engines are unable to follow links from other websites because the target URL is forbidden, then your website will not get the authority that those links are passing, and as a consequence, you may not rank as well overall.
This is because search engines cannot follow links from other websites.
Getting indexed pages deindexed
Even if the URL is prohibited and search engines have never crawled the page before, disallowed URLs still have a chance of being indexed.
Using the Disallow command does not cause pages to be removed from indexes. This is due to the fact that the crawling and indexing processes tend to operate in isolation from one another.
Setting rules which ignore social network crawlers
Even if you do not want search engines to scan and index specific sites, you may still want social networks to be able to access those pages so that a page snippet can be created.
For instance, Facebook will make an effort to visit each page that is uploaded on the network in order to provide a relevant tidbit of information to users. When establishing the rules for robots.txt, keep this in mind.
Preventing access from being made from staging or development sites
It is not recommended to use the robots.txt file to prevent access to a whole staging site. Although Google suggests not indexing the pages but continuing to let them be crawled, in most cases, it is preferable to make the website inaccessible to users coming from outside the organization.
When there is nothing for you to block,
Some websites that have a very simple architecture do not require any of their pages to be protected from web crawlers. In this particular scenario, the absence of a robots.txt file and the subsequent return of a 404 status code when the file is requested is totally appropriate.
In addition, search engines may perform routine updates to the robots.txt file in order to ensure that they have the most recent instructions for crawling and indexing a website.
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