In this article, we have featured What is a Robots.txt File and How to Use it for SEO. A robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website to index and which ones to ignore. This is important for SEO because it allows you to control which pages the search engines see and index, and which ones they don’t.
The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of your website (e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt).
When a crawler visits your site, it will first look for this file in the root directory and then follow the instructions in the file. If there is no robots.txt file, the crawler will assume that everything on your site should be indexed.
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There are two main ways to use robots.txt for SEO:
1) To tell crawlers which pages to index
2) To tell crawlers not to index duplicate content
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail:
If you have a large website with thousands of pages, you probably don’t want all of those pages to be indexed by search engines. That’s because most of those pages are probably not very relevant or important, and they might even contain duplicate content (more on that later).
Instead, you only want the most important and relevant pages on your site to be indexed by search engines. You can use robots.txt to do this by specifying which pages you want the crawlers to index and which ones you don’t. For example, if you have a page at www.example.com/page1 that you want to be indexed, you would add the following line to your robots.txt file:
Allow: /page1
Conversely, if you have a page at www.example.com/page2 that you don’t want to be indexed, you would add the following line:
Disallow: /page2
You can also use wildcards when specifying which pages to index or ignore. For example, if you have a bunch of pages with similar URL structures (e.g. www.example.com/page3, www.example4, etc.), you can use a wildcard like so:
Allow: /page*
This would tell the crawlers to index all pages that start with “/page”. Wildcards can be very useful when dealing with large websites with lots of similar pages.
Duplicate content is an issue that can hurt your SEO because it confuses the search engines and makes it difficult for them to determine which version of a page should rank higher in the search results. As a result, they might choose not to index any version of the page at all!
To avoid this problem, you can use robots .txt to specify which version of a page should be indexed by the search engines using what’s called a “canonical” tag. The canonical tag looks like this:
Link: <canonical_URL>; rel=”canonical”
For example, if you have two versions of a page (www .example .com/page1 and www .example .com/page2), and you want the www .example .com/page to be indexed, you would add the following line to your robots.txt file :
Link: https://www .example .com/page1; rel=”canonical”
This would tell the crawlers that https://www .example .com/page 1 is the canonical URL for both versions of the page, and it should be indexed instead of https://www .example .com / page 2. You can also specify multiple canonical URLs using this format :
Link : <canonical_URL>; rel=”canonical” , <other_canonical_URL>; rel=”canonical” , …
This is useful if you have multiple versions of a single piece of content ( e . g . blog post) across multiple URLs ( e . g one blog post might be accessible at www . blogsite1 . com / post1and www . blogsite2 / post 1 and). By specifying multiple canonical URLs, you’re telling crawlers which URL should be indexed instead of any other duplicates that might exist out there on the web.
Also, Read:
In conclusion, a robot’s txt file is a text file located in the root directory of your website that tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website should be indexed and which ones should be ignored.
This is important for SEO because it allows you to control which pages the search engines see and index, and which ones Theydon ‘t see and ignore(thus preventing duplicate content from being indexed ).
You can use robots.txt to specify which pages to index or ignore by using either an “Allow” or “Disallow ” statement for each respective URL, or you can use a “Link:” statement with are = “canonical” attribute to specify one or more c anonicalURLsfor a page or group of similar pages across multiple URLs
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