We cannot have enough of SEO. It’s like quicksand that keeps getting deeper. SEO is just not a word or concept but is a whole universe in itself, holding several big and small planets in its womb.
In many articles, prior to this, we have talked at length about hyperlinks, anchor texts, online and offline SEO. Any online SEO agency can guide you through detailed information on robots.txt.
Today we are here to talk about robots.txt. Here goes an easy explanation.
What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is basically a file. They are the files that prevent search engine spiders from creeping into web pages or certain sections of web pages. Search engine spiders, also, known as web crawlers that crawl around in web pages in order to gather information about them and index them for future purposes.
An easy explanation of this would be when we type to search something on google. The results that appear do not appear out of thin air. But are indexed in google and are materialized according to the search of a user.
Why do we need robots.txt?
Not every site or website needs robots.txt. But that doesn’t loosen their importance. The main reasons for availing robots.txt and the effects that they produce on your SEO are as follows:
- To block non-public pages
Oftentimes, your site may contain pages that you don’t want to be indexed by Google or in any other way. These pages are important for your website. Now, there can be instances when random people may just land up on your page and plagiarise the content or make a duplicate of it. Robots.txt is needed just to counter or avoid such circumstances.
- Monitoring the crawl budget of your page
Too much indexing can cause to hinder your crawl budget. By employing robots.txt, unnecessary indexing of pages can be brought under control because robots.txt will help to prevent unnecessary indexing.
- Preventing indexing of resources externally
Oftentimes, functions of meta directives and robots.txt are used interchangeably, but robots.txt is way more efficient when it comes to the handling of pdfs or images files. Robots.txt prevents indexing of resources that are difficult for meta directives to handle.
- Directing the crawlers
Apart from serving as a gatekeeper to prevent crawlers from indexing pages unnecessarily, robots.txt also do the job of directing the crawlers towards the pages the indexing of which seems important.
How to use robots.txt file to make an impact on your SEO?
Now that we have familiarised ourselves with the basics and nuances of robots.txt file let’s take a look to how to utilise it.
The process of utilising robots.txt file is simple, and this process works for all devices. You just need to enter the domain and URL name and add robots.txt at the end to fetch the robots.txt file.
Conclusion
Just when we thought that knowledge about the above concepts is enough, we realised that there is more to it and it would be near to blasphemy if we overlook the importance of the other many concepts that reside within the SEO universe.
You have bumped into the right article because today we shall take a sneak peek into another such feature of SEO, the learning of which will take your prized possession.
What we deduce from our learning of robots.txt file is that it is one of the most effective ways to enhance the efficiency of SEO on the internet and that robots.txt is no way less important than other concepts like hyperlinks, anchor texts etc. that we have discussed about in articles prior to this.
