Why We Create Robots.txt File

How do I create a robots.txt file for my website?

Writing a robots.txt file is extremely easy. It's just an ASCII text file that you place at the root of your domain. For example, if your domain is www.mywebsite.com, place the file at www.mywebsite.com/robots.txtFor those who don't know what an ASCII text file is, it's just a plain text file that you create with a type of program called an ASCII text editor. If you use Windows, you already have an ASCII text editor on your system, called Notepad.The file basically lists the names of spiders on one line, followed by the list of directories or files it is not allowed to access on subsequent lines, with each directory or file on a separate line. It is possible to use the wildcard character "*" (just the asterisk, without the quotes) instead of naming specific spiders. When you do so, all spiders are assumed to be named.Take the following robots.txt file for example:User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/The above two lines, when inserted into a robots.txt file, inform all robots (since the wildcard asterisk "*" character was used) that they are not allowed to access anything in the cgi-bin directory and its descendants. That is, they are not allowed to access cgi-bin/whatever.cgi or even a file or script in a subdirectory of cgi-bin.If you have a particular robot in mind, such as the Baidu search robot, you may include lines like the following:User-agent: BaiduDisallow: /This means that the search bot, "Baidu", should not try to access any file in the root directory "/" and all its sub-directories. This effectively means that it is banned from getting any file from your entire website.You can have multiple Disallow lines for each user agent (ie, for each spider). Here is an example of a longer robots.txt file:User-agent: *Disallow: /images/Disallow: /cgi-bin/  User-agent: BaiduDisallow: /The first block of text disallows all spiders from the images directory and the cgi-bin directory. The second block of code disallows the Baidu spider from every directory.It is possible to exclude a spider from indexing a particular file. For example, if you don't want Baidu search robot to index a particular picture, say, mybike.jpg, you can add the following:User-agent: BaiduDisallow: /images/mymugshot.jpgHope this helps you!

What is robots.txt file in SEO?

The robots.txt file basically serves as a ‘guide’ for any search engine bot that visits your website. You have to add a robots.txt file to your website because websites do not contain that file by default.Use of the robots.txt file :-The function of a robots.txt file is to ‘instruct’ the crawlers on which part of the website are they allowed to crawl and what part of the website has been restricted for them to access. It’s usually a best practice to keep sections like the login area, out of the reach of robots. By default all part of a website is available for crawl and restricting or hiding a part using robots.txt can simply mean :-1. You do not want that part of the website to appear in any of the search results.2. That restricted portion of your website contains sensitive information to which you cannot risk anyone’s access.Interesting fact :-Whenever you fill a Captcha on any website, you are actually proving that you are indeed a user and not a Search Engine Bot.

What is a robots.txt file? Where can it be in a website?

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want.Robots.txt is a text file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door, you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. Robots.txt is an important To Boost up Your Search Engine Ranking!Hope this will helpful

What should I do or use to create a sitemap and robots.txt for a WordPress website?

There are two questions, 1) Sitemap Creation 2) Robots.txt creationWhen you are using wordpress to develop your website that means you are allowing yourself for the best possible option you will be with to do anything on your website. There are plenty of options you can use in wordpress to use both of them sitemap & robots.txt.Sitemap Creation:-There is a number of ways through which we can generate Sitemap, In this article i will discuss about two of them.First is, There is a great tool(Plugin) to manage your total Search Engine Optimization things in wordpress site is Yoast Plugin. By installing this plugin we can generate sitemap for our site.Second is, We can choose from various types of free sitemap generator available in the market. One of them is, Create your Sitemap Online, Through this site we can easily generate a xml sitemap file, first of all we need to download that which we need to upload in our root folder of the cpanel hosting of our website.Robots.txt Creation:-There are also two ways of creating robots.txtFirst one is, Create a text file using your computer, use these following tagsUser-agent: *tag for general information
Disallow: /*tag for those pages which you do not want to crawl in SERP
Allow: /*tag for those pages which you want to crawl in SERP
after writing these tags save the text file with this name “robots.txt”.After saving that file upload this file to the root domain of your website using cpanel file manager.Second way is to define your robots.txt file is using google webmaster(Search console) tool. After successful login to your webmaster you will find robots.txt section, go to that section you will find a blank page. use those previous tags to allow or disallow your pages for crawl.These are the ways through which we can create Sitemap & Robots.txt. I you are having any issues with the previous answer please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Is there a default robots.txt file in WordPress?

What is robot.txt?Robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt, is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots– typically search engine robots– how to crawl and index their website pages. A robots.txt file is a publicly available file, meaning that anyone can see what sections a webmaster has blocked from search engines. Essentially robots.txt tells Googlebot and other crawlers what is and is not allowed to be crawled; while the noindex tag tells Google Search what is and is not allowed to be indexed and displayed in Google Search.The Basics of robot.txtRobots with parameters “noindex, follow” are used to restrict crawling or indexationHowever malicious crawlers tend to ignore robots.txt so the above protocol is not a reliable security measureOnly one “Disallow:” line is permitted for each URLThe filename of robots.txt is case sensitive. Make sure you use “robots.txt”, not “Robots.txt.”Spacing is not an accepted way to separate query parameters. For example, “/category/ /product page” would not be honored by robots.txt.

Is it necessary to have a robots.txt file in our website?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door.You can run successfully your website without a robots.txt file. Before a search engine crawls your site, it will look at your robots.txt file as instructions on where they are allowed to crawl (visit) and index (save) on the search engine results.

What happens when I don't add a robots.txt file to my website? Is this important or not?

It is not mandatory to have a robots.txt file for the website.When you don’t have a robots.txt file, the search engine robots will have full access to your site and index anything they find on the website. This is fine for most websites but it’s really good practice to at least point out where your XML sitemap is so search engines can find new content without having to slowly crawl through all the pages on your website and bumping into them days later.