What is Robots.txt and how to use?

You want search engines to ignore duplicate pages in your website If you do not want your internal search results pages to be indexed then If you want search engines not to index some of your directed pages, then If you want to not index some of your files like some images, PDFs etc. then If you want to tell the search engines where your sitemap is located then.

How to make a robots.txt file?

If you have not yet created a robots.txt file in your website or blog, then you should make it very soon because it is going to prove very beneficial for you later. To make it, you need to follow some instructions:

Firstly, create a text file, and after that save it as robots.txt. For this, you can use Notepad if you use Windows or Macs then you can save text edit according to you.

Now upload it in the root directory of your website. Which is a root level folder and is also called "htdocs" and it appears after your domain name.

If you use subdomains then you need to create separate robots.txt file for all subdomain.

Where does the Robots.txt file reside in the website

If you are a WordPress user, it resides in your site's Root folder. If this file is not found in this location, the search engine bot starts indexing your entire website. Because the search engines do not search your entire website for the bot Robots.txt file.

If you do not know if your site has a robots.txt file? So, in the search engine address bar all you have to do is type it - example.com/robots.txt A text page will open in front of you as you can see in the screenshot.

This is the Robots.txt file of realdigitalmarketer. If you do not see any such txt page, then you have to create a robots.txt file for your site.

Apart from this, you can check it by going to Google Search Console tools.

The basic format of the Robots.txt file is very simple and looks like this,

These two commands are considered a complete Robots.txt file. However, a robots file can contain multiple commands of user agents and directives (disallows, allows, crawl-delays, etc.)

Preventing all Web Crawlers from indexing websites

Using this command in the Robots.txt file can prevent all web crawlers / bots from crawling the website.

All Web Crawlers Allowed to Index All Content

This command in the Robots.txt file allows all search engine bots to crawl all the pages of your site.

Add a Sitemap to a Robots.txt file

You can add your sitemap to Robots.txt anywhere

What if we don't use Robots.txt file?

If we do not use any Robots.txt file, then there is no restriction on search engines as to where to crawl and where not it can index everything that they find in your website. This is also all for many websites, but if we talk about some good practice, then we should use Robots.txt file because it makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, and make them all pages again and again. There is no need to go.