What Is Robots.txt & How to Create a Robots.txt File

Robots.txt is a file that instructs search engine robots or spiders on which pages or sections of a website should be crawled or indexed. It is a simple text file that is placed in the root directory of a website to communicate with search engine bots.

The purpose of creating a robots.txt file is to prevent search engines from crawling and indexing specific pages on a website that may not be relevant or useful to users. It can also be used to prevent web crawlers from accessing sensitive areas of a website or to prevent duplicate content from being indexed.

Creating a robots.txt file is a straightforward process. Here are the steps to create a robots.txt file:

  1. Open a text editor such as Notepad, TextEdit, or Sublime Text.
  2. Create a new file and save it as “robots.txt” (without quotes) in the root directory of your website. If you’re not sure where the root directory is, it’s usually the main folder that contains your website files and folders.
  3. Write the instructions for search engines in the file, following the format below:

User-agent: [name of the search engine bot] Disallow: [URL path you want to block]

Here’s an example of how to block search engines from crawling a specific page:

User-agent: * Disallow: /page-to-block.html

In this example, the asterisk (*) after “User-agent:” means that the rule applies to all search engine bots. The “Disallow:” command tells the bots not to crawl or index the page “/page-to-block.html”.

  1. Save the file and upload it to the root directory of your website using an FTP client or your website’s file manager.

It’s important to note that creating a robots.txt file doesn’t guarantee that search engines won’t crawl or index the blocked pages. Some search engine bots may ignore the instructions in the file, and other bots may still index the blocked pages if they find links to them from other websites.

In conclusion, creating a robots.txt file is an important step in optimizing your website for search engines. It allows you to control which pages or sections of your website are crawled and indexed, which can help improve your website’s search engine rankings and visibility.