7 Uses of Robots.txt You Probably Didn’t Know About

10-Feb-2022 12:00:00 AM by SST in On-page seo, seo

Recently, people have been a buzz about robots.txt files. But what is a robots.txt file and why should you care?

A robots.txt file is a simple text file that can be found at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site should not be indexed or crawled by their engine bots. You don't need to know code to create one and it's an easy way to keep your site organized and protected from spam crawlers and hackers. Here are 7 ways to use robots.txt files that you probably didn't know about:

What is robots.txt?

A robots.txt file is a text-based file that can be found at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site should not be indexed or crawled by their engine bots.

How to create a robots.txt file

It's easy to create a robots.txt file. Using this robots.txt generator tool to create seamless file without any hassles.

1) Open the tool called Robots.txt file generator:

Fill all the fields with respective information according to your website requirement.

2) Save your file as robots.txt

3) Upload the file to the root of your website

Why robots.txt is important

Robots.txt files are important for two reasons. First, they help you keep your website organized and findable by humans who want to access your website. Second, it keeps your site protected from spam crawlers and hackers looking to disrupt your business online.

If you are using a WordPress blog, then the robots.txt file is automatically created for you by default. You can change the settings through the WordPress dashboard, but there are plenty of other ways to go about creating one if you're not using WordPress.

1) Anchor Text

It's important to use anchor text when posting links on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. It's also good practice to use anchor text in emails and blog posts so that people can find your content with their favorite search engine or social media site.

2) Privacy Concerns

Use a robots.txt file if you have privacy concerns about certain parts of your website being indexed by bots or crawled by search engine crawlers. For example, if you're running an e-commerce store, then it would be advisable to create a robots.txt file that only indexes the public pages on your site which don't require sign up for shopping (like product pages). That way, customers

7 ways to use robots.txt files

1. Prevent bots from crawling your site's images.

2. Control which pages are crawled by your site's spiders.

3. Block bots from crawling your site's images that use excessive bandwidth (e.g., thumbnails).

4. Control how pages are indexed in the search engine results page (SERP).

5. Control how deep crawling should go on your website (for instance, if you don't want a bot to crawl past a certain folder or file).

6. Control how specific words should be formatted in the SERPs, like whether they should be italicized or underlined.

7. Prevent crawlers from indexing emails and other personal data like phone numbers and social security numbers.

Protecting your site from search engine crawlers

Search engine crawlers are programs that search for and index the information on your website. Your site may not want to appear in search results because of sensitive information, so you can use a robots.txt file to tell bots which parts of your site they should ignore.

Let's say your business is doing some maintenance on its website and you don't want it being indexed by search engines during this time. You could put a message in your robots.txt file that says "User-agent: * Disallow: /maintenance/" which would tell all bots that they cannot access any pages with the "/maintenance" folder.

Keeping spam crawlers off your site

If you're getting frustrated with the number of bots that are crawling your site and submitting fake data, it's time to install a robots.txt file. You can use this file to keep crawlers off your site.

Preventing hackers from crawling your site

A robots.txt file can be used to keep your site from being crawled by search engine bots and prevent it from being indexed in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Hackers will often use a site's index to find vulnerabilities to launch attacks. Keeping your site safe is a lot easier with a simple robots.txt file at the root of your site.

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