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Written by Tijn Aarden, 19 July 2024

What is robots.txt?

A robots.txt file is important for any Web site. It tells search engines which pages they may view and which they may not. A good robots.txt file helps you control what appears in search results. It also helps you improve your SEO by ensuring that search engines index only the most relevant content. This will make your website more visible online and increase the number of visitors to your site. And that, of course, is what we want.

What is a robots.txt file?

A txt file is a small text file placed in the root directory of your website. It is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) and gives instructions to user agents and search engine crawlers about which parts of the Web site they are allowed to crawl. By blocking certain files and pages, you can prevent information or certain pages from being indexed. This not only helps you make better use of your crawl budget, but can also improve your site’s SEO. Thus, a properly set robots.txt is highly recommended for your SEO strategy.

User agent

Examples user agents

A user agent is the search engine robot visiting your Web site. Each search engine has its own specific user-agent, such as:

  • Googlebot (Google)
  • Googlebot-Image (Google Images)
  • Applebot (Apple)
  • Slurp (Yahoo)
  • Bingbot (Microsoft Bing)
  • Baiduspider (Baidu)
  • DuckDuckBot (DuckDuckGo)

By giving specific instructions to a user-agent, you can control which parts of your site are crawled by which robots. This helps manage your content and protect sensitive information. It is important to understand which user-agent is visiting your site so that you can give the right instructions and make your website perform optimally in search results.

What does such a file look like?

A simple example of a robots.txt can look like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /private/

Sitemap: https://www.jouwwebsite.nl/sitemap_index.xml

This file indicates that specific user agents should not crawl certain private pages, while the sitemap is indicated. This allows search engines to know which parts of the website to index and which to ignore. A good robots.txt file helps you properly manage your site and protect it from unwanted access to sensitive parts.

Allow

The “Allow” instruction in a robots.txt tells robots which pages and files they are allowed to crawl. This is useful if you want a particular section of your site indexed while the rest is blocked. By providing good instructions, you can increase the visibility of certain pages in search results. It is important to carefully determine which parts of your site you want to make accessible to search engines.

Disallow

The “Disallow” instruction indicates which pages and files should not be crawled by the robots. This is important for protecting sensitive data and optimizing the crawl budget. By excluding specific parts of your website, you can ensure that search engines index only the most relevant content. This helps improve your website’s performance in search results.

Check with your own website

Want to check if your website has a txt file? You can easily check this by typing“/robots.txt” after your website’s URL. Here you can then see if your website has a robots.txt or what the current instructions for robots are. With us, it looks like this:

https://www.2manydots.nl/robots.txt

Make sure important pages and files are accessible and sensitive data is protected. You can check your robots.txt for errors in Google Search Console’s txt tester .

Create your own robots.txt?

Creating a robots.txt file can be done in several ways. It can be done manually, using your SEO plugin or possibly with an online generator. We are happy to explain it to you.

1. Manual setting

You can create a robots.txt file manually by opening a text file and typing the desired lines into it. Then you upload this file to your website’s root directory via an FTP client. Google Developers has a fine guide for this. Creating a robots.txt file manually gives you complete control over the instructions you want to give.

2. With an SEO plugin

There are also SEO plugins available that make creating and managing a robots.txt file easy. Plugins such as Rank Math and Yoast SEO have a user-friendly interface that allows you to add or change rules quickly and easily.

3. Robots.txt generator

There are online tools available, such as SEOptimer ‘s robots.txt generator or SERanking, that make the process even easier. You simply enter the desired instructions and the tool generates a robots.txt file that you can download and upload to your website. These generators are useful for users who want to quickly create a robots.txt file.

Put it in your sitemap

It is important to always include your robots.txt file in your xml sitemap. This helps search engines find and follow all relevant instructions at once. This improves the efficiency of the robots and increases the chances that your important content will be indexed correctly. You can also place multiple sitemaps, if you have more sitemaps. It is important that you put the absolute url in your file.

Important to know

There are a few important points to keep in mind when using a robots.txt file:

  • Robots.txt is publicly accessible: anyone can view your robots.txt file, so make sure it does not contain any sensitive information.
  • Exclude malware bots via a separate rule: use specific rules to exclude known malware bots.
  • The order matters: the order of the lines in your robots.txt file can affect how major search engines interpret the instructions.
  • Some search engines still index private files: even with a “Disallow” instruction, some search engines may still try to index private files.
  • Search engine robots can sometimes find excluded pages anyway: use additional methods such as a noindex tag to protect sensitive content.
  • Entering ‘Disallow: /’ sets the entire site to no-index: this can be useful during site development, but be sure to remove this line before the site goes live.

Questions about SEO? Get in touch with us!

Do you have questions about how to optimize a robots.txt file for your website? Or would you like to learn more about SEO and how it can improve your online visibility? Then contact us!