With the rise in online businesses, search engine optimization and digital marketing have also gone to another level. Now and then, businesses are looking for diverse ways to improve their marketing and get ahead of their competitors.
The majority of businesses opt for both local and technical SEO to achieve the desired results. The most pivotal thing in technical SEO is robots.txt. It is the robots.txt that is prone to most errors which in turn can make you lose all the ranking and put your efforts in vain. Using robots.txt carefully brings significant improvement in SEO rankings.
The majority of businesses and marketers fail to realize the significance of robots.txt. Consequently here we have come up with a post dedicated to robots.txt, its significance, and relevance to marketers.
Here’s an insight into the significance of robots.txt.
About Robots.txt
No doubt many marketers do technical SEO for businesses but they are hardly familiar with what robots.txt is in reality. It is a text file with instructions from the search engine robots which keeps them updated on the pages that crawl and the ones which fail to crawl.
Initially, the robots.txt files seem complicated but when one tries hands-on, it seems simple. Optimizing the robots.txt files is crucial for businesses struggling to achieve the desired results.
Significance of Robots.txt.
Managing the web crawler activities becomes easy with the robots.txt file which in turn empowers them not to overwork the website or the index pages not intended for public view. Still, if you are in doubt, here are the points stating the significance of robots.txt.
Hide Resources
Some businesses prefer Google not to take up resources such as PDFs, images, and videos from the search results. It is because they intend to keep these resources private and want google to emphasize more on their significant content. Consequently, businesses can hide resources using robots.txt and prevent their files from being indexed.
Prevent duplicate and non-public pages
Not every page is meant to be crawled on your site as businesses don’t want to rank all their pages on search engines. Examples of such pages include staging sites, duplicate pages, login pages, and internal search results pages.
These pages are only meant for existence, not to be indexed and found in search engines. Fortunately, you can use robots.txt and prevent these pages from crawlers and bots.
Optimize crawl budget
The next reason that robots.txt matters to businesses is because it optimizes crawl budget. The number of pages Google crawl on your site is known as the crawl budget. How many pages it crawls depends on the site’s size, health, and backlinks.
If the pages exceed your crawl budget, then your site will have pages that are not indexed which in turn marks the significance of the crawl budget. Non-indexed pages also mean no ranking.
Fortunately, you can unblock unnecessary pages with robots.txt so that Googlebot can spend money on the pages that matter to you.
Creating Robots.txt File
The majority of the businesses out there struggle with creating a robots.txt file and do not have one. No worries if you don’t have any robots.txt file as it is pretty easy to create one. There are a wide variety of tools to create robots.txt such as the robots.txt generator tool.
But tools are not the only ones for creating robots.txt as you can also create one by yourself. Follow these 4 steps to create robots.txt:
- Creating a robots.txt file and naming it
- Adding a rule to the file
- Uploading the file to the site
- Testing the file
Let us learn about all these steps in detail and create the robots.txt file.
Creating a file and naming it
Commence by opening a .txt document with the help of the text editor and web browser. It will be better if you don’t use the word processor as it saves files in a proprietary format with random characters.
Once you are done with this, you need to name the document- robots.txt to start with typing directives.
Add directives to the robots.txt file
Secondly, you need to add directives to the robots.txt file. It consists of one or more groups of directories. These groups consist of multiple lines of instructions. Every group consists of a user agent and contains crucial information concerning the user agent, access to pages with the user agent, and a sitemap to hint the search engines about the significant pages.
You can also create a new group of directories once you are done with the specific instructions of Google. You can also add your sitemap once you are done with this. Lastly, you need to save the robots.txt file and name it robots.txt.
Upload robots.txt file
You need to upload the robots.txt file to your website and let the search engines crawl it once you have saved your file to the computer. Like the above-mentioned steps, there is no tool to help you with this.
It depends on your site’s file structure and web hosting, and how much time uploading the robots.txt file takes. You can ask for help in this case from your hosting provider or by searching online.
Tests robot.txt file
Finally, you can test your robots.txt file to figure out if it is working appropriately or not. It will run appropriately if you have uploaded it properly. You can test it by opening a private window in the browser and looking for the robots.txt file.
If you can see the added content, it simply means that you are ready to test the markup. As such, there are two options for testing the markup of the robots.txt file.
You can use the robots.txt tester in the search console. The other option is using Google’s advanced open-source robots.txt library. As you can see, the second alternative is advanced, so you can test your robots.txt file in the search console.
Having a search console set up is a must to test your robots.txt file. Also, link your website with the Google search console account. For this, you need to add a property first and verify that you are the real owner of the site.
Upon doing so, the tester will identify the warnings and highlight them. You can also get to know the number of warnings below the editor. There is a provision to edit the errors as many times as you wish.
But to implement the changes, you need to copy and paste them on the robots.txt file as the changes made on the page are not saved to the site.
Conclusion
Updating your robots.txt file is crucial if you are adding pages but have no plans to index those pages by search engines. Doing so will increase the security of the website and give you the best results with search engine optimization.