You may tell search engine spiders to avoid certain pages on your site by including a robots.txt file in your site's root directory. The file uses the Robots Exclusion Standard, a protocol with a small set of commands that can indicate access to your site by sections of the Web crawlers. It is only a request, not a command, so not all crawlers will obey it.
The robots.txt file is used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes to direct which parts of a website are crawled and indexed. By including a robots.txt file on a website, website owners can specify which pages should not be crawled by search engine bots, and therefore, not indexed by search engines. This is useful if a website owner does not want certain pages to appear in search engine results, such as those under development or containing sensitive information.
While robots.txt may be used to restrict search engines from crawling certain sites, this does not ensure that these pages will not show in search results under any circumstances. Search engines may still index the pages if they are linked to other websites or if the URLs are directly typed into the search bar. Also, robots.txt can only prevent search engine crawlers from crawling pages and not other types of bots, it should not be used as a form of security.
The purpose of directives in a robots.txt file is to control which pages or sections of a website are crawled and indexed by search engines. The two main directives used in a robots.txt file are "User-agent" and "Disallow/Allow".
The "User-agent" directive is used to specify which web crawlers the rules in the robots.txt file apply to. For example, "User-agent: Googlebot" will apply the rules only to the Googlebot crawler. The wildcard "*" can be used to apply the rules to all web crawlers.
The "Disallow" directive is used to tell web spiders to avoid certain parts of a website or certain pages. For example, "Disallow: /private/" will block web crawlers from crawling any pages in the "private" directory of your website.
The "Allow" directive is used to specify specific pages or directories that should be crawled. For example, "Allow: /private/allowed-page.html" will block web crawlers from crawling the "private" directory, except for the "allowed-page.html" page.
A sitemap and a robots.txt file serve different purposes in SEO.
Sitemaps are files that catalog every page on a website and indicate when and how frequently they are updated. Sitemaps are used to help search engines discover and index all the pages on a website. They may also be used to advise readers of the page's priority or update frequency, among other things. Having a sitemap, which is commonly an XML file, on your website is suggested but not required.
On the other side, the robots.txt file instructs search engines not to scan certain areas of your site. The file uses the Robots Exclusion Standard, a protocol with a small set of commands that can indicate access to your site by sections of the Web crawlers. It is only a request, not a command, so not all crawlers will obey it.
Search engines utilize sitemaps to identify and index all of a website's pages, whereas the robots.txt file determines which pages and portions of a website are accessible to search engine spiders.
You may make a robots.txt file for your site with the help of a program called the "Robot.txt Generator" from seowiz.net. How to utilize the tool is as follows:
One should visit the Robot.txt Generator website, which may be found at the following URLs: https://www.seowiz.net/robots-generator. Second, In the "Your website's URL" area, type in the address of your online presence. Third, choose the sites you don't want search engines to access. You may prevent access to certain parts of your website by selecting the relevant checkboxes, or you can block individual pages by using the "Custom" option. Fourth, choose the "Generate" button. Fifth, depending on your preferences, the program will create a robots.txt file. The file's contents may be copied and pasted into a new text file on your computer, after which it can be uploaded to the website's root directory. Testing the robots.txt file is as simple as visiting your website's URL followed by "/robots.txt" once you've uploaded it to the root directory. The contents of the robots.txt file will be shown so that you may double-check that everything is set up correctly.
Keep in mind that this is only a generator and not a validator; use it as a starting point for your creatingts.txt file, but don't let it replace your knowledge of the language's syntax or its implementation. The robots.txt file should not be relied upon alone to manage which sites are crawled since not all web spiders will follow the instructions included within it.
The Robot.txt Generator tool by SEOWIZ.net comes with a variety of features that make it one of the best free tools for SEO work. Here are some of the key features of the tool:
Using the Robot.txt Generator tool by SEOWIZ.net comes with a range of benefits, including: