Guide to Understanding Robots.txt for Better SEO

Do you know about the search engine crawler? If so, then it means you have an idea about how it crawls your website and collects data. There is another informative tip that you can suggest to the crawler to leave a certain part of your website.

In this way, you may be able to provide directions to search engine crawlers to help them perform the best crawl. This approach has consistently been used by SEO experts to perform search engine optimization practices for best results.

Yes, this is robots.txt approach. Are you interested in learning more about this approach? So, why wait? Let’s Start!

Robots.txt is the way to communicate with the search engine crawlers and provide them with your engagement rules. Furthermore, the file can be used to send signals to the search engine about what to index and what not.

For instance, on Nogentech, we have disallowed the admin page, feed, tag, and more. On the other side, we have allowed the sitemap_index.xml for the search engine crawler.

But the question that occurs is why to allow and disallow? Simply, if you want something on the search engine index section, then allow it, and vice versa. Sitemap is the file on which a search engine finds the complete website data, and allowing it means that it’s indexed.

If you over-confidently try to put your robots.txt file in a place where it has no use, then you may face destructible issues. Therefore, you need to set your robots.txt file in the root of your domain. For instance, if your domain is (https://www.nogentech.org/), then your file should be at its root as (https://www.nogentech.org/robots.txt).

The search engine crawler crawls through links, and when it crawls, it continues to index link pages. When a crawler gets a link, it continues to open the link and also follows the link through site A to site B and site C.

Firstly, the crawler follows the robots.txt files of the link and gets an idea about whether to crawl or not. Only then is the robots.txt file helpful in communicating with the crawler and redirecting it to another place.

Robots.txt has directory suggestions for different search engine crawlers. How to know which message is for which crawler? Thereby, the way of “user-agent” is followed to allow crawler. You are free to play wildcard entry into robots.txt file by putting a similar user-agent while accessing search engines, such as User-agent: Googlebot.

Spider Directories of Robots.txt

Here are some spider directories for user-agents on Google.

You may have a question about CSS and JS files, such as whether you should block them or not. Remember, you shouldn’t block them for crawlers because Google has warned you to do so in 2015.

The reason behind this is that by blocking the CSS and JS files, site owners don’t allow crawlers to check if their site works correctly or not. Further, it may get lower rankings because the crawler doesn’t get what your website is.

Search engines want to know whether your website’s users’ experience is enhanced by JS or ruined. This statement is more relevant because Google is more human now.

Providing validation to your robots.txt file to get better outcomes. Google provides users with a validation tool in Google Search Console. You are free to check changes before making it live because it definitely impacts your website ranking.

The robots.txt file is a method to communicate with crawlers to provide them with navigation and directions. You may allow them to crawl a specific page and also disallow them to prevent their crawling on certain pages.

Moreover, CSS and JS have an impact on your site to enhance or ruin your site’s user experience. Thereby, allowing crawlers to crawl your website and check if your website is working efficiently and providing boosted user experiences.

In the above section, I have compiled a comprehensive guide on robots.txt for better SEO. Further, I have stated a tool that will help you provide validation to your robots.txt file.