Robots.txt is an important file that contains instructions to search engine spiders that tells them which pages are to be indexed and made public, and which pages should not be crawled.
It is important that all the pages of our website are indexed by search engines and that the search engines do not skip any pages for good search rankings. Whenever, search engine spiders visit a website, the first file that they search is the Robots.txt file. They use this file as the starting point because this is where they will find information regarding how they should treat the site. If there is no Robots.txt file, then by default it will try to crawl all the pages. But in practice, we can see that the search engine spiders skip some of the pages in their indexing for reasons of its own. However, if there is a Robots.txt file, which says that the spider should crawl all the pages, then it will ensure that none of the pages are skipped.
At times, some of the pages in our website should not be crawled such as pages within the members' account and other pages with sensitive information, etc. In such scenarios, it is important that we tell the search engine spiders that they should not index and list such pages in the search results. This information will be included in the Robots.txt. There may be situations whereby you may be adding a new page to your website but those might be still under construction. This page may have broken links and incomplete information. So when search engines crawl pages with broken links then it will have negative effect on the search rankings. Therefore, in such situations too, using Robots.txt we can stop the search engine spiders from visiting those pages.
There are times when we will be having two versions of the same content in our website for various reasons such as in the case of having a print friendly version and web version of the same page. Such pages can run into duplicate content issues with the search engines leading to receiving penalties from search engines that will affect our ranking. Therefore, to protect ourselves from such problems, Robots.txt file is highly important.
It is important that all the pages of our website are indexed by search engines and that the search engines do not skip any pages for good search rankings. Whenever, search engine spiders visit a website, the first file that they search is the Robots.txt file. They use this file as the starting point because this is where they will find information regarding how they should treat the site. If there is no Robots.txt file, then by default it will try to crawl all the pages. But in practice, we can see that the search engine spiders skip some of the pages in their indexing for reasons of its own. However, if there is a Robots.txt file, which says that the spider should crawl all the pages, then it will ensure that none of the pages are skipped.
At times, some of the pages in our website should not be crawled such as pages within the members' account and other pages with sensitive information, etc. In such scenarios, it is important that we tell the search engine spiders that they should not index and list such pages in the search results. This information will be included in the Robots.txt. There may be situations whereby you may be adding a new page to your website but those might be still under construction. This page may have broken links and incomplete information. So when search engines crawl pages with broken links then it will have negative effect on the search rankings. Therefore, in such situations too, using Robots.txt we can stop the search engine spiders from visiting those pages.
There are times when we will be having two versions of the same content in our website for various reasons such as in the case of having a print friendly version and web version of the same page. Such pages can run into duplicate content issues with the search engines leading to receiving penalties from search engines that will affect our ranking. Therefore, to protect ourselves from such problems, Robots.txt file is highly important.
1 comments:
This is really useful information. No all the people don't know about importance of robots.txt. I can learn this from your blog. Thank you for sharing this useful information. SEO Company in Singapore
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