Write a Robots.txt File
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One of the most fundamental steps when optimizing a website is writing a robots.txt file. It helps tell spiders what is useful and public for sharing in the search engine indexes and what is not. It should also be noted that not all search spiders will follow your instructions left in the robots.txt file. In addition, a poorly done robots.txt file can stop the search spiders from crawling and indexing your website properly. In this article I will show you how to be sure everything will work correctly.
While there are many other SEOs who will tell you that a robots.txt file will not improve your rankings, I would disagree, in order for the robots to index your site properly, they need instruction on which folders or files to not crawl or index, as well as which ones you want to have indexed.
Another good reason to use the robots.txt file is because many of the search engines tell the public to use them on their websites. Below is a quote taken from Google:
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.
Even though others feel this is of no use unless you are blocking content, keep this in mind; when a search engine goes out of their way (and this is the tightest-lipped search engine ever) to tell us to use something, it is usually to ones advantage to follow the little clues we are offered.
Also if you read your stats file on your web hosting server, you will usually find the URL to your robots.txt being requested. If a search bot asks for the robots.txt and does not find it on your server, the spider often just leaves.
I am including a screen shot from my own web hosting stats. As you can see below, the robots.txt file is #14 of the top URLs requested on my site. Keep in mind, no human visitor is looking at that file, yet it ranks better than a lot of the human visited pages. Now if the bots want that file that much, it is something everyone should be using.
Side Note:
The # 2 requested URL is sitemap.xml. That URL is not where my visitors sitemap is located, but rather the xml file for Google Sitemap Implementation. So as can be seen, Google is downloading this file almost daily.
Next: How Do I Build a Robots.txt? >>
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