Why Robots.TXT Is Vital To SEO?

Robots.txt is a small file but it plays a huge role in your SEO efforts. With its importance in search engine optimization, our SEO agency in Los Angeles, Website Depot, pays close attention to it. But what is it exactly?

This file is just a text file that advises the robots, typically the search engines, what pages on your site to check and which ones must not. When a search engine enters your site, it checks your site’s robots.txt first for instructions.

Robots.txt file has different types. One of them is the user-agent. Here, it applies to all web robots, not just the search engine.

If you put a “disallow” in it, it instructs the robot not to visit the pages on the site. There is a valid reason for stopping the robots from checking your site.

If the search engine goes and crawls your site, it will check each page of your site. It can negatively impact your ranking, if your site has tons of pages as it takes a while for it to crawl all of them. In terms of Googlebot, it has a crawl budget.

This budget is the amount of time it allows to crawl a site. The budget is based on a crawl rate limit and demand. Now, if Google sees that it takes a lot of time to crawl your site, thereby hurting user experience, it slows down the rate of the crawls. As a result, the search engine cannot view your net content quickly. It negatively affects your SEO.

The said file lets you control over what the search engines can crawl and when. In that way, you can prevent wasting Google’s crawl budget in checking those insignificant pages on your site.

With the help of disallow, it tells the search engine not to index those pages as they are not vital to the site.

How To Optimize This File For SEO?

It hinges on your site’s content. There are ways to maximize it. However, you must not use this file to block pages from the search engines.

To optimize it, you must tell the search engine not to index parts of your site that you choose not to display to the public.

Prevent Duplicate Content

This file also serves other uses. One of them is to stop the duplicate content from being viewed. If your site requires more than one copy of the content, then you can stop Google from penalizing your site because of duplicate content.

You can also use this file if you wish to conceal those unfinished pages so that the search engine will not index them before they are done.

Creating Robots.Txt File

Our SEO agency in Los Angeles consists of web designers and developers who know how to properly create this file to optimize the search engine. It is part of our job in optimizing your site so that the search engines will love crawling it as it does not take a lot of time indexing it. To know more about how we can help you optimize your site, please contact our SEO experts at (888) 477-9540.