What Is Robots.txt and How Do I Implement It?

For your website to rank in search results, Google needs to crawl and index it. This process enables Google to discover the content on your website, understand what’s on the page, and show your pages in the appropriate search results.

To help Google crawl your pages, you must use a robots.txt file. On this page, we’ll answer all your burning questions about robots.txt files, including:

• What is a robots.txt file?
• Why does robots.txt matter?
• How do I implement robots.txt? 

Keep reading to learn more about robots.txt!

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines what pages to crawl and which ones to avoid. It uses both “allow” and “disallow” instructions to guide crawlers to the pages you want indexed.

Robots.txt example

So, what does a robots.txt file look like? Each robots.txt file looks different depending upon what you do and don’t allow Google to crawl.

If there are pages you do allow bots to crawl, the code will look like this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Allow: / 

The user-agent is the bot you allow (or don’t allow) to crawl your website. In this robots.txt example, you’re allowing Googlebot to crawl pages on your website.

Now, if you don’t want a bot to crawl pages on your website, the code looks like this:

User-agent: Bingbot

Disallow: / 

For this robots.txt example, this code indicates that the Bingbot cannot crawl pages on a website.

Why is robots.txt important?

So, why does robots.txt matter? Why do you need to worry about integrating this file into your website?

Here are some reasons robots.txt is crucial for your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy:

1. It keeps your website from getting overloaded

One of the biggest reasons to implement a robots.txt file is to prevent your website from getting overloaded with crawl requests.

With the robots.txt file in place, you help manage the crawl traffic on your website so that it doesn’t overwhelm and slow down your website.

Google will send crawl requests to crawl and index pages on your website — it can send dozens of requests at once. With the robots.txt file in place, you help manage the crawl traffic on your website so that it doesn’t overwhelm and slow down your website.

A slow website has negative consequences for SEO, since Google wants to deliver fast-loading websites in search results. So, by implementing the robots.txt file, you ensure that Google doesn’t overload and slow down your website while crawling it.

Keep in mind, your robots.txt file isn’t exclusive to search engine crawlers like Google or Bing. You can also use your robots.txt file to direct crawlers from others websites. As an example, look at the robots.txt file for Starbucks, which delays a certain bot:

2. It helps you optimize your crawl budget

Every website has a crawl budget, which is the number of pages Google crawls within a specific amount of time. If you have more pages on your website than you can allow within your crawl budget, it leads to pages not getting indexed, which means they can’t rank.

While your robots.txt file can’t keep pages from getting indexed, it can direct crawlers on where to spend their time.

Using robots.txt helps you optimize your crawl budget. It helps guide Google bots towards the pages you want indexed. While your robots.txt file can’t keep pages from getting indexed, it can keep the crawl bots focused on the pages that need to be indexed most.

3. It helps block crawlers from crawling non-public pages

Every company has pages on their website that they don’t want to appear in search results, like login and duplicate pages. Robots.txt can help keep these pages from ranking in search results and blocks the pages from crawlers.

6 tips to do robots.txt for SEO successfully

Ready to implement a robots.txt file into your website? Here are 6 tips to help you do it successfully:

1. Make sure all your important pages are crawlable

Before creating your robots.txt file, it’s important to identify the most important pages on your website. You want to ensure those pages get crawled, so they can rank in search results.

Before creating your robots.txt file, document the important pages you want to allow search bots to crawl. These might include pages like your:

• Product pages
• About us page
• Informational pages
• Blog posts
• Contact page

2. Only use each user-agent once

When you create your robots.txt file, it’s important that each user-agent is only used once. Doing it this way helps to keep your code clean and organized, especially if there are quite a few pages you want to disallow.

Here’s a robots.txt example showing the difference:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /pageurl

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /loginpage

Now, imagine you needed to do this for multiple URLs. It would get repetitive and make your robots.txt file difficult to follow. Instead, it’s best to organize it like this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /pageurl/

Disallow: /loginpage/

With this setup, all of the disallowed links are organized under the specific user-agent. This organized approach makes it easier for you to find lines you need to adjust, add, or remove for specific bots.

3. Use new lines for each directive

When you create your robots.txt file, it’s crucial that you put each directive on its own line. Again, this tip will make it easier for you to manage your file.

So, anytime you add a user agent, it should be on its own line with the bot name. The next line should have the disallow or allow information. Every subsequent disallow line should be on its own.

Here’s a robots.txt example of what not to do:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /pageurl/ Disallow: /loginpage/

As you can see, it makes it more challenging to read your robots.txt and know what it says.

If you make a mistake, for example, it’ll be difficult to find the right line to fix.

Putting each directive on its own line will make it easier to make changes later.

4. Make sure you use proper use cases

If there’s one thing to know about robots.txt for SEO, it’s that this file is case-sensitive. You need to ensure you use the proper use cases, so it works correctly on your website.

First, your file needs to be labeled as “robots.txt” in that use case.

Second, you must account for any capitalization variations of URLs. If you have one URL that uses all caps, you must input it in your robots.txt file as such.

5. Use the “*” symbol to give direction

If you have numerous URLs under the same address that you want to block bots from crawling, you can use the “*” symbol, called the wildcard, to block all those URLs at once.

For example, let’s say you want to disallow all pages that pertain to internal searches. Instead of blocking each page individually, you can simplify your file.

Instead of it looking like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search/hoodies/

Disallow: /search/red-hoodies/

Disallow: /search/sweaters

You can use the “*” symbol to simplify it:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search/*

By implementing this step, search engine bots are blocked from crawling any URLs under the “search” subfolder. Using the wildcard symbol is an easy way for you to disallow pages in batches.

6. Use the “$” to simplify coding

There are numerous coding tricks you can use to make it easier to create your robots.txt file. One trick is to use the “$” symbol to indicate the end of a URL.

If you have similar pages you want to disallow, you can save yourself time by using the “$” to apply it to all similar URLs.

For example, let’s say you want to keep Google from crawling your videos. Here’s how that code might look if you do each one:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /products.3gp

Disallow: /sweaters.3gp

Disallow: /hoodies.3gp

Instead of having all of them on separate lines, you can use the “$” to disallow all of them. It looks like this:

User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /*.3gp$

Using this symbol indicates to crawlers that any pages ending with the “.3gp” cannot be crawled.

Broaden your SEO knowledge

Adding robots.txt to your website is crucial for helping Google crawl your pages without overloading it. It’s one of the aspects that will help you do SEO effectively.

Looking for more information about SEO from the experts? Check out our blog to learn more about what you need to do to have a successful SEO strategy!