The robots.txt file contains rules and regulations for search crawlers to interact with your websites. This is helpful because it prevents search engines from crawling pages such as pages with duplicate content, which is helpful for e-commerce sites. The reason why this is so helpful to websites is that it prevents your site from overloading with requests.
There Are Several Use Cases
- Many search engines may miss crawling your important pages because they are crawling the products and search pages.
- Prevent search engines from crawling specific file types, such as images, PDFs, videos, and Excel sheets.
- Keep specific areas of your website private.
- Prevent the servers from becoming overloaded by search engine crawlers.
- Specify the location of your XML sitemap to be able to find it easily.
Understanding the Language of Search Engine Crawlers
User-Agents- use to call out specific search engine crawlers. The search engine crawlers will crawl out your website and then they will look for the robots.txt file in the root folder of your website and follow the robot.txt rules. If there is a disallow rule on let’s say a PDF, the crawlers will know that they do not have access to crawl that.
The allow rule gives the Googlebot or user-agent access to a page subfolder even if the parent page or subfolder is disallowed. A crawl-delay rule instructs the user-agent to wait however many seconds it was told in the rule before crawling your page. Next, there is the sitemap, which tells search engine crawlers where the sitemap is located.
- /- is a file path separator. If you enter it as a single property such as disallow: /, it will disallow the Googlebot or user-agent to crawl your entire site.
- *- is considered the wild card and will disallow or allow anything that comes after this property.
- #- are looked at as comments.
