A “robots.Txt” is a text file within the root directory of a website informs web crawlers what is the content not allowed to be crawled in that web page. The protocol to inform bots is known as “robots.Txt protocol “or “Robots Exclusion Protocol” or “Robots Exclusion Standard”. The identify robots indicates that it’s meant for the online crawlers like search engine bots and not for human users. Though it’s up to the search engines to obey the request or no longer, many search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex comply with the content in the robots.Txt file.
How does it work?
Let us take an example of Googlebot (used by Google search engine) suffering a web page “http://example.com/consult with-my-web page.Html”. Earlier than enters the web page, it looks for a file “/robots.Txt” in the root directory of the domain that is “http://example.com” and complies with the rules within the file. This means Googlebot will read a file “http://example.com/robots.Txt” before trying to read that web page.
No Robots.Txt File in a website.
So far as Google is involved if there is no need to restrict entry to detailed pages on a website online then there’s no need for a robots.Txt file. Even an empty file isn’t required and Googlebot will crawl your whole content. This is probably not true for other bots crawling a website. If there is not any file present in the root directory of a web site, then different bots might also assume that the entire content will also be crawled but your server logs will likely be cluttered with thousands of 404- web page no longer determined the error. Considering the fact that bot will first seem for the file, the server has to reply with a 404 popularity code to inform the bot that there is not any file available.
Although lots of the up to date content administration tools dynamically generate a robots.Txt file to restrict this limitation, that you could add an empty file to avoid server log problem even you do not have something to restrict from search engines.
Robots.Txt file containing two attributes: user agent and allow or Disallow parameter. “User-agent” inside the file suggests the identity of the robot and “Disallow or allow” informs the robot to crawl or now not the preferred path on the server. One of the important usages is given under:
Allow all web crawlers to access all content:
Allow all web crawlers to access all content:
Prevent entry to all content :
Allow a directory:
Limiting a single page:
Some search engine crawlers like Google accepts the use of “allow” attribute as below for allowing all content access:
Use a” Disallow” and “Allow” attributes in a single file can also be feasible. That you could make access only to Google and block all other crawlers for a site:
User-agent: * # all robots
Disallow: / # are disallowed to crawl all pages
User-agent: Googlebot # beside Googlebot
Allow: / # can crawl all content
All paths in the file are relative besides Sitemap. Robots.Txt file if added with a Sitemap directive must have an absolute path of a Sitemap to notify search engine crawlers about the area of your XML Sitemap as below:
Create and Validate Robots.Txt File?
Robots.Txt is a simple text file may also be created with a Notepad in windows situated PCs or with TextEdit in OS X situated Macs. The text file will also be saved in ASCII structure and uploaded in a root directory of a web server.
If the web hosting company provides a listing based website address link “http://example.Com/consumer/website online/” then it isn’t possible for an individual user to create a separate “robots.Txt “file for their site. Validators are used determine the correctness of the robots.Txt file for possible misuse of slash back image (/). Robots.Txt tester is a free tool available in Google Search Console with the following features:
- View live in the robots.Txt file.
- Replace the file and choice to download it. (You add this to your server).
- Submit/Fetch update file to Google.
- Check any URL is blocked or allowed for Googlebot, Google-news, and Google-image.
Robots Meta Tag and rel=”Nofollow”
Additionally to robots.Txt file, content will also be restricted utilizing Meta robots tags. Webmasters probably confuse with a robots.Txt file, robots meta tags and rel=”no follow” link attribute. Here’s a brief explanation what’s going to occur when a page is blocked?
Through Robots.Txt – Search engine crawlers are not going to the web page and stop after reading a robots.Txt file. Still the page will be shown as a link in a search result without a description or with a message like we would like to show you our description right here but the website won’t allow us in Bing. A description for this result isn’t available cause this site ” robots.Txt” in Google.
Through Robots Meta Tag – crawlers will entry the web page and find Meta robots tag when crawling. If “noindex” attribute is located then the page will not be indexed and shown in search results. If “nofollow” attribute is determined then the links in that web page might not be followed.
Through Rel=”nofollow” – That is used in HTML anchor tag <a> to inform crawlers not to follow the hyperlinks in the page when considering that ranking within the search results. The page content will be crawled, indexed shown in the search result as normal.