What is robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file that serves as the first point of contact between a website and search engine crawlers. It acts as a communication tool between the website owner and the search engines, by instructing the search engine crawlers what pages or sections of the website should be crawled and indexed.
The primary purpose of the robots.txt file is to prevent crawlers from indexing and caching sensitive or secure information that should not be publicly available. For instance, a website may want to prevent search engine crawlers from accessing certain directories that contain confidential files, or private user data such as login credentials or payment information.
How to edit and use robots.txt
If you’re looking to edit or use the robots.txt file on your website, it’s important to understand the basics of how it works. To begin with, you’ll need to have access to your website’s file system, either through the cPanel or FTP access. Once you have access, you can navigate to the root directory of your website and find the robots.txt file there.
The robots.txt file is a simple text file that can be edited with any text editor, including Notepad, Sublime Text, or Notepad++. You may want to create a backup copy of the original file before you start editing it, just in case something goes wrong.
To create specific rules for how search engines should interact with your website, you’ll need to format your instructions in a particular way. The basic syntax for a robots.txt directive is as follows:
User-agent: [search engine bot]
Disallow: [list of pages, directories, or file types]
For example, if you wanted to block Googlebot from indexing pages in a particular directory,
you could add the following:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /directory-name/
This would tell Googlebot not to crawl pages within the specified directory, which could be useful if the content is not relevant or is outdated.
When you’re finished editing your robots.txt file, be sure to save it and upload it to the root directory of your website. You can then use a robots.txt checker tool to verify that it’s working properly and blocking any pages or directories you’ve specified.
Overall, the robots.txt file can be a useful tool in helping to manage the indexing and crawling of your website by search engines. By learning how to edit and use the robots.txt file in Ultahost, you can increase your control over how search engines interact with your site and ensure that your content is fully optimized for maximum visibility in search engine results pages.
Head to Ultahost.com to get started!
