What Is Robot.txt And How To Create It ?

Search Engine software otherwise known as robots or bots, keep visiting website to crawl updated information and help in indexing them. This helps users to get the information about the website, when he/she does any query in search box.

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Hence shortly we can define robot.txt file as ” A file in the root of your website that can either allow or dis-allow (restrict ) search engine robots/bots  from crawling pages of your website(s). “

Now the question is how does this robots or bots crawl websites and why they do so ?

I have already provided the second question answer in my first paragraph and now the question is how does it crawl websites. They do this via links which I have shown in below diagram :

websitelink

Circles : Represents websites, Arrow : Represents link within websites

With the help of robot.txt file, we can direct robot to if crawl website or not and which pages we can allow it to crawl. Hence robots first check the instruction provided and doesn’t go out of this.

“If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don’t need a robots.txt file ”

Therefore one need to check if your website is having proper robot.txt file or not otherwise go for creating it with the help of below guidelines :

How to create a /robots.txt file ?

Where I  can put my generated robot.txt file ?

Below I have shared the ways how one can add robot.txt file. There are two ways to do so :

1) Shortest Method : in the top-level directory of your web server.

2)Long Method :

When a robot looks for the “/robots.txt” file for URL, it strips the
path component from the URL (everything from the first single slash),
and puts “/robots.txt” in its place.www.manojblogszone.com

For example, for “http://www.domainname.com/seo/index.html, it will
remove the “/shop/index.html“, and replace it with “/robots.txt“, and will end up with “http://www.domain.com/robots.txt”.

So, as a web site owner you need to put it in the right place on your web server for that resulting URL to work. Usually that is the same  place where you put your web site’s main “index.html” welcome page.

Remember :

  • How and where to put the file exactly , depends on your web server software.
  • Remember to use all lower case for the filename robots.txt“, not “Robots.TXT

The “/robots.txt” file is a text file, with one or more records.

Below I am sharing the format how one can create and how to tell robot what to index while scanning :


To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To allow all robots complete access
User-agent: *
Disallow:

(or just create an empty “/robots.txt” file, or don’t use one at all)

To exclude all robots from part of the server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/
To exclude a single robot
User-agent: BadBot
Disallow: /
To allow a single robot
User-agent: Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To exclude all files except one

This is currently a bit awkward, as there is no “Allow” field. The
easy way is to put all files to be disallowed into a separate
directory, say “stuff”, and leave the one file in the level above
this directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /~manoj/stuff/

Alternatively you can explicitly disallow all disallowed pages:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /~manoj/junk.html
Disallow: /~manoj/images.html
Disallow: /~manoj/bar.html

Reference links :
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
Also one can make or edit own created robots.txt file using the robots.txt Tester tool. With this one can test changes as per the adjustment.

Hope you liked this topic and would like to share your opinion. Please do share your comments and also the issues which you are looking out to solve.

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Manoj Kumar Sethi

Manoj Kumar Sethi has been into Digital Media industry for more than 12 years and has handled and helped clients from B2B & B2C industry.He is proficient in Digital Media skills mostly into digital product development and growth. He has also depth knowledge in Analytics. In free time, he research on new development happening in digital world.He loves blogging as it helps him to share the knowledge and solve problems.

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