When it comes to search engine optimization, you need to leverage the custom robots.txt generator, but first, you need to know how to use it.
Failure to understand how a custom robots.txt generator works and you integrate it into your website, you may be harming your site by mistake.
A robots.txt file is used by website owners to stop the search engine bots from indexing or crawling a specific portion of a website.
In essence, you are asking the search engine not to index a page on your blog or website and the page will never appear in the search engine results.
We have already established that the robots.txt file notifies the search engine robots of specific areas of your website that you don't want the bots to index.
Let's say you have a few videos on your website that you wouldn't want Google or any other search engine to index and make it appear in the search results.
In a situation like this, you can use the custom robot.txt generator to block Google and others from seeing them.
Here we will talk about some common words that you will likely see when you begin to use the robots.txt file.
Sitemap: This is a file that provides information on all the contents on your website to the user agents. Google bots also go through this file to enable them to crawl your site properly.
Disallow: You can use this command to ask google and other bots not to crawl or index a web URL. You can only use just one "Disallow" line for each of the URLs.
User-agent: These are the specific search engine bots that you are talking to and asking them not to crawl pages of your website.
It could be google, bing, etc.
Allow: This is only relevant for Google crawl bots. You can use this command to communicate with the bot that it can have access to a page or subfolder even if you have Disallowed the parent page or subfolder.
As a blogger or a website owner, you may begin to wonder why pages of a website need to be blocked. However, we shall list 3 reasons why you need a robots.txt file to block a page.
Firstly, if there is a page on your website that is a duplicate of another page, it is ideal that you should kick against the Google bots crawling it.
If the Google bots index the duplicate page, such an act can hurt your website SEO because it will be seen as a duplicate content.
Secondly, if there is a page on your website that users are not supposed to have access to unless they perform a certain action, you can use a robots.txt file to block such a page.
For instance, let’s say you have a thank you page on your website that users have access to when they provide their email address to you and you don’t want people to have access to the thank you page through a Google search.
This is where a robots.txt file can come in.
Thirdly, you can also block pages or files on your website if you wish to protect the private files that are visible on your website.
Private files like your cgi-bin can be blocked so the Google bots don't consume your bandwidth by indexing your images.
Now you have seen why the custom robots.txt generator is very important in your web journey. This is why Advance SEO Tools made sure the custom robots.txt generator tool is freely available for everyone.
If you’re looking for an XML Sitemap Generator, a robots.txt generator for WordPress, or a custom robots.txt generator for blogger, head to Advance SEO Tools and make your dreams come true with their arsenal of digital marketing tools.