What Are Web Robots and how do they affect SEO?

Understanding the role of robots.txt files is also part of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. A text file that gives instructions to web robots, including search engine bots, about which pages of a particular website are allowable to be indexed and others to ignore.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• About Web Robots
• Sitemap Linking
• Save your Robots.txt File
• Review

About Web Robots

Search engines use web robots (crawlers, spiders) to index (crawl) websites, web pages, and information within their directories. If a website or page is not indexed, the page will not appear in search results.

Web robots receive instructions from /robots.txt files on what websites or pages to index, which is known as The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Prior to crawling a website, the robots check https://www.example.com/robots.txt to verify what pages, if any, are not supposed to be crawled and indexed.

• Web robots will know that they have access and can crawl the site if they see:
  
  User-agent * and Disallow: /

Sitemap Linking

The SITEMAP command is used to let search engines and robots know where a website’s sitemap is located. The sitemap lists all areas and pages accessible to robots. The complete robots.txt is similar to the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
SITEMAP: http://www.advancedhtml.co.uk/sitemap.txt

Save Your Robots.txt File

To ensure robots and crawlers from Google and other search engines can identify your robots.txt files correctly, you need to apply the following conventions to your file:

1. Save the robots.txt code as a text file.
2. Name the file as robots.txt. Save the file.
3. Place the file in your site’s highest-level directory or in the root of your domain directory.

Correct example for your website page: http://www.yourwebsitename.com/robots.txt

Review

By using Robots.txt files, you can manage the relationship of search engines with your site. Specifying which pages you would like crawled and indexed will end up optimizing the presence and performance of your site in search results. In other words, a well-configured robots.txt file helps you ensure that important content for your website is concentrated on by the search engine, thereby turning your SEO efforts around positively and making the user experience more positive. The tool, if understood and applied effectively, can mean a whole lot in the work in terms of ranking the website with search engines and its overall success.