{"id":8506,"date":"2017-12-15T11:36:29","date_gmt":"2017-12-15T09:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/?p=8506"},"modified":"2021-06-26T16:44:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-26T13:44:37","slug":"robots-txt-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/robots-txt-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Robots.txt SEO – How to Optimize and Validate Your Robots.txt"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the first things you need to check and optimize when working on your technical SEO is the robots.txt file. A problem or misconfiguration in your robots.txt can cause critical SEO issues that can negatively impact your rankings and traffic.<\/p>\n

In this post, you will learn what is a robots.txt file, why do you need it, how to SEO optimize it, and how to test that search engines<\/a> can access it without any problems.<\/p>\n

If you are on WordPress there is towards the end of this article, specific information about WordPress virtual robots.txt file.<\/p>\n

What is robots.txt?<\/h2>\n

A robots.txt is a text file that resides in the root directory of your website and gives search engines crawlers instructions as to which pages they can crawl and index, during the crawling and indexing process.<\/p>\n

If you have read my previous article on how search engines work<\/a>, you know that during the crawling and indexing stage, search engines try to find pages available on the public web, that they can include in their index.<\/p>\n

When visiting a website, the first thing they do is to look for and check the contents of the robots.txt file.<\/p>\n

Depending on the rules specified in the file, they create a list of the URLs they can crawl and later index for the particular website.<\/p>\n

The contents of a robots.txt are publicly available to the Internet. Unless protected otherwise, anyone can add view your robots.txt file so this is not the place to add content that you don\u2019t want others to see.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What happens if you don\u2019t have a robots.txt file?<\/strong> If a robots.txt file is missing, search engine crawlers assume that all publicly available pages of the particular website can be crawled and added to their index.<\/p>\n

What happens if the robots.txt is not well-formatted?<\/strong> It depends on the issue. If search engines cannot understand the contents of the file because it is misconfigured, they will still access the website and ignore whatever is in robots.txt.<\/p>\n

What happens if I accidentally block search engines from accessing my website? <\/strong>That\u2019s a big problem. For starters, they will not crawl and index pages from your website and gradually they will remove any pages that are already available in their index.<\/p>\n

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