Robots.txt Guide: Control Search Engine Crawlers Efficiently

🎯 Purpose:The robots.txt file guides search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) on how to access your website.

📌Robots.txt Guide: Control Search Engine Crawlers Efficiently

Common uses
Prevents🤫 indexing of specific pages (e.g., admin panel, private sections)
Reduces 📉 server load
Focus 🎯 bots on key content
⚠️ Important: Relies on bot cooperation! Not a security measure against malicious bots. 🛡️🚫

📍 Location of robots.txt

The robots.txt file must be placed in the root directory of your website.
📂 Example Path:
https://example.com/robots.txt

🚨 Important:
❌ If placed in a subdirectory (https://example.com/folder/robots.txt), it won’t work!
✅ Always ensure it’s accessible via https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
⚠️ If the robots.txt file is not in the root directory, robots will generally ignore it.

📌 General Structure and Directives of robots.txt
A robots.txt file consists of rules that control which parts of a website robots can access. 🤖📜

🔹 User-agent Directive
Specifies which bot the rule applies to:
🛠️ User-agent: * → Applies to all robots.
🔍 User-agent: Googlebot → Applies only to Google’s web crawler.
🔎 User-agent: Bingbot → Applies only to Bing’s web crawler.

🚫 Disallow Directive
Blocks bots from crawling specific pages or directories:
❌ Disallow: /private/ → Blocks access to /private/.
❌ Disallow: /temp.html → Blocks access to /temp.html.
⚠️ Disallow: / → Blocks entire website! Use with caution! 🛑

✅ Allow Directive
Overrides Disallow and lets bots crawl specific content:
✅ Allow: /public/allowed.html → Lets Googlebot crawl /public/allowed.html even if /public/ is blocked.
📢 Note: Not all bots support Allow, but Googlebot does!

🗺️ Sitemap Directive
Helps search engines find important pages:
📍 Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Example robots.txt File

# 🔹 User-agent Directive  
User-agent: *  # Applies to all robots  
User-agent: Googlebot  # Applies only to Google’s web crawler  
User-agent: Bingbot  # Applies only to Bing’s web crawler  

# 🚫 Disallow Directive  
Disallow: /private/  # Blocks access to /private/  
Disallow: /temp.html  # Blocks access to /temp.html  
Disallow: /  # Blocks entire website! ⚠️ Use with caution!  

# ✅ Allow Directive  
Allow: /public/allowed.html  # Lets Googlebot crawl /public/allowed.html even if /public/ is blocked  

# 🗺️ Sitemap Directive  
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

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#Indexing