Robots.txt is a file that explains how a crawler should move on different parts of a website to collect information about it. Also called robots exclusion protocol, it tells crawlers about the parts of a site that need indexing.
Apart from instructing a crawler to limit its scanning to certain parts of a site, a webmaster also uses it for another purpose.
They create robots.txt for website and use it to restrict crawlers from collecting information about the parts that either under development or have a duplicate piece of content or sensetive sections on the website.
However, some crawlers like email harvesters, and malware detectors, tend to override the instructions contained in the robot.txt file to identify the loopholes of a website.
Such crawlers are intrusive by nature. The rationale behind sending such crawlers is to get into the forbidden directories of a website and thereby, wreak havoc. Spurious web crawlers do it to collect the sensitive information of a website.
By doing this, they pave the path for viruses and other potentially unwanted programs.
Other than a user agent, a robot.txt file also consists of directives to direct the crawlers so they act in a particular way while gathering the information of a website.
The primary directives used for this purpose include “Allow” and “Disallow”. Also, to prevent a crawler from crawling through a website immediately or to buy out some time in the process a webmaster uses the directive “Crawl-Delay”.
For successful execution, it is important to write these commands below complete Robots. Txt file.
Whether you generate a robots text file for free or use a paid tool for this purpose, its importance cannot be overlooked.
As a webmaster, you may want the search engines to only index those pages or parts that you wish to be available to your visitors.
Moreover, you would want only such parts to be scanned by the spiders and crawlers of Google or any other search engine that do not consist of any duplicate content.
At the same time, you may also want to make certain that the crawlers and spiders of a search engine use intended bandwidth without any tendency of overusing the bandwidth available on your website. Otherwise, the latter may slow down.
Lastly, the security of various components of a website matters to its owner as well as visitors. Viruses, malware, and dozens of other potentially unwanted programs can affect a website as well as the device used to access it.
A robot.txt file prevents the possibility of the damage of a website and reduction of the bandwidth due to some unwanted actions of rogue crawlers and spiders.
A robot.txt file performs the aforementioned functions indirectly by instructing crawlers or spiders of a website not to access some sections of a website for indexing. This constitutes its biggest importance.
At the time of visiting a website, a search engine checks for the presence of the robots.txt file on it. Almost all search engines adopt this practice as a standard rule.
At first, a search engine comes across the following two lines”
User-agent:*
Disallow:/
This is how default robots.text looks like the. The former instructs the search engine to follow its command, whereas the latter asks it to refrain from getting into any of the directories of the website.
This way, a robots.txt file not communicates with a search engine to follow its orders and refrain from indexing a website.
To make robots.txt file work for your website without any issues, it is important to choose the right robot.txt file generator. For this purpose, an online robot.txt file generator software comes in handy.
Here’s how creating the robots.txt file with the best Google robots txt generator can help your website:
It saves the bandwidth of a website by preventing spiders from crawling almost all the sections on a website. By instructing them not to crawl through certain sections of a website, it reduces the use of bandwidth in those sections.
It is due to the action of the robot.txt file that people get access only to that stuff on a website that a webmaster wants to show.
A robot.txt file is the best option to prevent a website from coming under a spam attack. Even as some crawlers override the instructions of robot.txt file, it happens only under rare circumstances.
After creating the robot.txt file, the next thing you need to do is validate your robot code. Thereafter, you need to include the file to the root directory of your website.
It is important to ensure that you upload the robots text file to your website’s directory in a desirable way in order to avoid any issue with it at the subsequent stages.
You can use our tool to create a custom robots txt file for SEO in a few simple steps.
Just make sure you do not omit any of the steps given below, and you will get your desired outcome effortlessly. Follow the steps given below.
When you are on our robots.txt generator tool page, first choose whether you wish to allow or disallow the robots.
Next, choose the duration for which you wish the crawlers to wait. You can choose duration of time between 5 and 120 seconds for this purpose.
Thereafter, you need to add sitemap to robots txt. You can do this by pasting the link to the sitemap of your website or. Leave it blank in case you do not have it.
Choose whether you want to allow or disallow the search robots of various search engines from crawling on your website. You can decide the action of search robots of various search engines on your website in line with your preferences.
Next, input or paste the links to the directories wherein you do not want the crawlers and spiders of a search engine to crawl.
In the last step, click either on the option “Create robots.txt”, or “Create and Save as Robots.txt” to achieve your desired outcome.
Follow these steps to use our create robots.txt file.
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