Webmasters use the Robots.txt text file to specify rules for web robots (usually search engine robots) to follow when crawling a website. The robots.txt file is a Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) component. It is a set of online standards for controlling how web crawlers and indexing tools interact with and present content to users. Instructions for search engines on how to handle links (including "follow" and "no follow" directives) are also included in the REP. These instructions can be given per-page, per-subdirectory, or per-site basis.
Robots.txt files often specify which user agents (web crawling tools) are authorised to crawl a website and which are not. Crawl directives can be either "disallowing" or "allowing" for specific user agents or all user agents.
In only a few clicks, our robots.txt analyser will generate a robots.txt file that is friendly to Google's bots, making website owners' jobs much simpler. This tool has an easy-to-use interface, letting you choose exactly what should be in the robots.txt file and what shouldn't. You may tell Google bot which files and records in your site's root index to crawl by using the robots.txt generator at sitespeedseo.com. You can decide which robots are allowed access to your website's index and which are not.
Files in the root catalogue of your website can be made accessible to specific robots, and you can inform those robots when a new file has been added. The robots.txt syntax is vital for every site since it generates a file diametrically opposed to the sitemap, which specifies the sites to be covered. The robots.txt file in the root of the domain is always the first stop for a search engine during a site scan. The crawler will read the file once it's found, and then it may determine which folders and files should be restricted.
Let's take a step back and examine the reasons behind generating a robots.txt file before we dive into the mechanics of how to do it. Only some pages on your site should be treated as an equal contender for search engine rankings. Consider the checkout confirmation pages, login pages, duplicate content, admin and staging regions of a website, etc. Including these URLs in a crawl doesn't really help SEO. Moreover, doing so can actually hurt your SEO efforts by consuming valuable crawl resources. This could lead you to ignore less important pages in favour of ones that contain content you could truly use. In addition, third-party crawlers, not only Google, can slow down your site; thus, blocking them can improve load times.
Unfortunately, not all website owners take the time to implement a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file generator online can be very beneficial in ensuring that search engine crawlers only index your real pages and not additional facts, such as those found via your statistics. Search engine crawlers use this file to determine which types of folders to explore. Using the robots.txt file, you can prevent search them from accessing irrelevant files and folders in your website's hosting directory. You have the option of blocking these crawlers from your site's statistics page and other places on your site where you know you have programming that spiders can't properly interpret.
Not all search engines properly display dynamically generated material, which is typically the result of using a programming language like ASP or PHP. If you don't want search engine crawlers to be able to access a certain directory in your hosting account, the crawler will only be able to see the files it needs to index your site properly. To be effective, the robots.txt file needs to be stored in the same folder as your site's other critical files. Therefore, you should create a new text file, name it robots.txt, and place it in the same directory as your index.htm file on your web host's server.
Follow these easy steps to generate a robots.txt file for your website using our powerful tool:
All Google robots.txt generation tools have access to your site's files by default; you can choose which ones to permit or prohibit. You can delay your crawls anywhere from 5 to 100 seconds by using the crawl-delay option. The default setting is "No Delay." If your website already has a sitemap, you can simply copy and paste it here. If you don't have any of those things, just leave that space blank. You may pick and choose which search robots you want to crawl your site, and you can block access to your files from others. Finally, directories must be contained. Because the path is relative to the root, it must end with a trailing slash.
A robots.txt generator tool makes it simple to add a new record or update an existing record in your site's robots.txt file. Copy the URL of the root directory and paste it into the top text content box on the robots.txt generation tool's edit page. Use our simple robots.txt maker to provide directives with either Disallow or Allow directives for user retailers for specific content on your website. If you want to highlight a newly uploaded directive in the list, click the upload directive button. To make changes to an existing directive, select the "dispose of directive" button and then "create new directive."
The free robot.txt file generation feature in sitespeedseo.com allows you to specify Google and other search engines, such as Yahoo, in your criteria. Select the "Person Agent" list container to give unique instructions to a single crawler. When you choose to upload a directive, a new custom phase is added to the list, which includes all the standard directives as subheadings. Create a new allow directive for the special user agent for the content to convert a standard disallow directive into an allow directive for that user agent. Similar to Allow, Disallow is not supported by the custom user agent.
When you're done using our free online robot.txt tool to create robots.txt files that Google bots can understand, you can then transfer them to the root directory of your website. Before you use our responsive tool, try it out and make a robots.txt sample file.
After making a robots.txt file, you may find yourself confused by the several sections of seemingly unrelated text. Let's dissect the online robots.txt generator's output directions.
Googlebot, Bingbot, Slurp, and Baiduspider are some of the most popular user-agents (all case-sensitive). All crawlers fall under the asterisk (except AdsBot crawlers; those need to be named individually).
Disallow lists that you don't want a crawler to access or index, and it's always the second item in each grouping. If you leave this field blank, the user-agent crawler will be able to access and index your entire site. In contrast, a "/" indicates site-wide exclusion from the specified crawler. Specific directories or pages can also be specified here, although each one will need its own line.
This lets you keep certain folders, subfolders, or pages from being affected by the disallow directive.
In an effort to conserve bandwidth and avoid causing a traffic spike, the crawler will wait the specified amount of time before accessing your site. Other search engines may continue to use this directive even though Google no longer supports it.
Even though it is highly recommended that you send your sitemap directly to Google Search Console, this robots.txt file generator directive can also be used to tell the crawlers of other search engines where to find your sitemap.
Using an online robots.txt generator removes the need for manual drafting of the robots.txt file. It reduces the time and effort required to type in different user agents, directives, and directories or pages to just a few clicks and copy/paste operations, thereby eliminating the possibility of expensive SEO mistakes.
Making a robots.txt file is a difficult, and the last thing you want is for it to be useless after all your hard work. Now, you can verify the accuracy of the robots.txt file generated by Google.
A little bit, certainly. A publicly accessible robots.txt file can be used to designate password-protected or otherwise restricted areas of your website. While the file itself poses no threat, it may lead malicious users to otherwise inaccessible parts of your website.
To clarify, a robots.txt file is not essential to have on a website. A bot that visits your site without one will still crawl and index the pages as usual. But it can affect the SEO of your site. This is why should use a robots.txt file generator to avoid SEO issues.