You may have heard the term robots txt in SEO, but what is a robots.txt file? And what is its significance when it comes to search engine optimization?
In this post we’ll explore what this is, how it works, and why it matters. So grab some coffee and learn everything you need to know from your favorite SEO Specialist in Atlanta.
Read More: How To Create & Submit A Sitemap: A Brief Guide
What is Robots.txt (a.ka. “Robot.txt?”)
A robots.txt file is a small text file. This text file is installed on your website in order to tell search engine crawlers like Googlebot they are allowed to crawl your site in the first place.
Furthermore, the robots.txt file helps tell the crawlers which pages on your site are the most important.
That way they crawl these pages first while ignoring pages that are less important.
Where Is The Robots.Txt File?
You can find the robots page pretty easily. Simply go to your domain home page. Then in the URL, add a forward slash robots.txt to the end of it. Then you will see your live robots.txt file.
Why Is Robots.Txt Important For SEO?
The robots file is very important for telling web crawlers if they can access your website and then how they should interact with your pages.
The most important content on your site should be crawled and indexed before everything else. However, certain pages aren’t useful for SEO, such as a login page or an empty page. In that case, you want to tell the web crawler not to visit that page.
Some additional benefits of robots.txt files for SEO are:
Optimize your crawl budget
Googlebot and other crawlers will only crawl web pages at a certain frequency, so you don’t want them to waste their crawls on pages that are not important.
Keep duplicate content in check
If you have duplicate pages on your website, then it can result in losing rankings for the pages. So determine which page is the most important one and instruct web crawlers to avoid the duplicate that you don’t want them to crawl.
Avoid overloaded servers
If web crawlers are crawling your page too often, they can cause your server to crash. This creates downtime and larger issues in your business, so you can use robots.txt to limit how often web crawlers can actually recrawl your site.
How To Create Your Robots.Txt File
You might be wondering “what is robots txt in SEO” because you need to create one. Depending on the software you use for your website, you may be able to create a robots file fairly quickly.
For instance, WordPress has several plugins that allow you to create robots.txt files without having to manipulate backend code. You can also manage your robots.txt file with FTP.
This web protocol is a little advanced, so it should be left to your web developer or professionals who know how to use it properly.
Managing A Robots.Txt File
To check your robots file, simply type in your website domain, followed by a forward slash in robots.txt. Here you’ll see your full robots.txt file.
SEO Specialist Atlanta
If you don’t want to deal with all the hassle of setting up and managing your robots file, let the experts handle it for you. At SEO Guru Atlanta, we can ensure your robots.txt file is set up properly.
In addition, we can manage it on an ongoing basis to ensure it’s always instructing web crawlers to index your most important SEO pages. Therefore, instead of asking yourself “what is a robots file?” you can focus on operating your business.
