What is robot txt in SEO?

One of the most important parts of your SEO plan is to introduce your website to Google, so Google bots will be crawling your website from time to time, based on your website crawling budget. Since every website’s crawling budget, which is basically the time that Google allocates to a website to be crawled and scanned, is limited, preventing Google bots from wasting the budgeted time on less important web pages by using robot.txt files becomes crucial. Let’s dive deeper into the subject and see what is a robot.txt file and what exactly it does.

What does robot.txt mean and what does it do?

Robot.txt is basically a file that tells the web crawlers which page to visit and which page to not! That’s a valuable tool in order to prevent bots from looking at low quality pages, pages that are not supposed to be seen by random users and any other pages that you don’t want to be indexed for any reason. Robot.txt file adds great value to your website’s performance on search engines by making your crawling budget to be spent as efficiently as possible. Even though robot.txt file is widely used by professional SEO agencies, it’s always a good idea to make sure that it is a part of your package, if you are looking for a good SEO company in Dubai to get them to work on your website’s SEO. 

How to create a robot.txt file

A simple robot.txt consists of two main parts which are called user-agent and disallow. Technically, user-agent refers to a special ID that all internet users including humans and robots have. For humans, the user-agent is pretty much limited to the device and the OS the user is using, while for robots. It includes all information about the robot. The disallow section is where the website administrator puts the precise address of the web pages that you don’t want to be scanned and indexed by all or specific robots. Now, let’s dive deeper for the sake of better understanding.

• What does user-agent mean?

Like specified above, user-agent is basically the name of the robot, so it makes it identifiable. For instance, the main Google crawler robot’s user-agent is called GoogleBot. By putting User Agent:GoogleBot on the robot.txt file, the web page becomes inaccessible to GoogleBot, or any other bot that its user-agent is in the robot.txt file. It is worth to say that if you want to prevent all types of bots from accessing to a specific webpage, you simply put User Agent: * on the robot.txt file.

• What to disallow in robot.txt 

In this section, you must put the precise address of the webpage that you want to be away from bots access. By combining these two commands you are capable of setting a wide range of rules to make your website optimized. For instance, if you want all robots be away from your whole website, you can do so by utilizing below command:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /

Alternatively, to prevent Google bots from accessing your blog posts, you may use below command:

User-Agent: GoogleBot

Disallow: /Blog/

You must be very careful in creating robot.txt files, as a small mistake would cause big damages for your website. Even though the SEO cost in Dubai, if comes from professional companies, is not cheap, it is always a good idea to work with well-experienced companies to avoid such errors and issues.

How far can you go with using robot.txt files on your website?

Robot.txt file plays a crucial role in enhancing your website performance on SERPs by optimizing your crawling budget as specified earlier in this article. That being said, it makes you capable of managing your crawling budget, your webpages and the indexing process. Hence, that sounds quite a good tool for improving SEO performance. However, based on Google guidelines, it is highly recommended to use robot.txt as little as possible. In other words, you will be better off by optimizing your website and making it neat and clean, so there will be less web pages that need to be blocked from bots. That would be the most efficient and recommended way to improve your website performance. However, it’s quite  acceptable to  use robot.txt files for some specific web pages. As an example, for an ecommerce website, there are web pages such as payment gateway or delivery tracking pages that are crucial to be in place, but are not needed to be indexed, so a robot.txt file can be utilized for such web pages. Even though a professional website design price in Dubai is relatively high, it is highly recommended to work with a professional web design company in Dubai, to build a shining website for the sake of using as little robot.txt file as possible. 

Bottomline

It’s always a good idea to help Google crawlers scan your website smoother and quicker. There are quite a few methods for making things easier for Google crawlers, such as SEO tagging, quality content and a lot more for easier and quicker crawling. At the same time, preventing crawlers from scanning less important pages, by using techniques such as robot.txt files and robot tags would optimize your crawling budget.

Websima DMCC, as one the leading digital marketing service providers is always here to help. We are more than happy to assist you, in case of having any issue or inquiry. If that’s the case, feel free to contact us to book for a free consultation meeting with our talented team.