What is Robot.txt?

Introduction

Robot.txt will tell the google search engine not to crawl certain pages on your website. The major search engine will recognize the request of robot.txt whenever it wants any page not to be indexed on google.

Usually, what happens is google indexes all the pages on our website even if this doesn’t need to be where robot.txt comes in hand. So it will avoid the indexing of unnecessary pages. So let us see why robots.txt is essential, how it is used etc.

Importance of Robot.txt

Every time robots.txt is not essential because google can recognize duplicate pages or unnecessary pages and don’t index them. So some websites can work without robot.txt, but you need it sometimes because google will index unnecessary pages.

So let us see for what reasons you have to need robot.txt:

If there is unwanted indexing of specific pages, for example, the login page, you don’t want them to be indexed, so this is where you need robot.txt so the user should not land on your unwanted page. So it is necessary to use robot.txt.

Suppose you have a problem indexing the pages. For example, you have a crawl budget problem. It is where you can use robots.txt. So it will help you get index your important pages. So your pages will crawl on google.

Meta directives help you index your page, but this is not always the scenario. For example, it won’t index videos, images or pdfs. So this is where you can use robot.txt. It will help index all the pages you want to index.

How does Robot.txt Work?

Robot.txt is a file without HTML code. However, we can host it on a web server like any other file on the website. For instance, you can view it with your website URL like this https://www.howtoincreasedomainauthority.com/robots.txt.com.

So basically, the google crawler will first land on this and look for pages that need to be indexed before going to any other pages on the website.

The web crawler will follow the specific instructions given by the robot.txt. However, if there are any technical issues crawler will ignore the robot.txt and move to other pages.

Protocols of Robot.txt

In the networking industry, the protocol is the set-up to provide commands or instructions. For example, in robots.txt, there are two protocols that it is based on:

The first protocol is sitemaps. It is the protocol of robot.txt that will help the crawler to show pages that need to be indexed.

The other protocol is called as Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol will tell google crawler which pages need to be avoided.

How to Create or Edit Robot.txt on WordPress

WordPress will create robots.txt by default every time. So you don’t need to worry about making it by yourself. But if you want to edit it, you can’t edit the file made automatically by WordPress.

So if you wish to file according to your desire, you must create it manually, where you can make changes as you want.

Let us see how we can make the Robot.txt file manually

If you are using a popular Yoast plugin on your website, So on the left side of the page, you will see SEO. Click on it, and then you will see the dashboard, then features. Under features, you will get an option of Advance Setting Pages; enable that.

Once you activate that, you can go to SEO, where you’ll find a tools option; click on that, then file editor after clicking on the file editor. It will give you an option of Create robots.txt file. This is one option where you can manually create your robot.txt file.

Conclusion

In this article, we have covered all the points about robots.txt. What exactly is robot.txt, its importance, what does it do, and how is it useful for your website? You can make a robots.txt file manually on your website.

We have included step-by-step instructions on how you can create your robots.txt file using the SEO Yoast plugin.