Chapter 4: Technical SEO
A robots.txt file is a text file that instructs web robots (also known as web crawlers) on how to crawl and index pages on a website. It is a part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content to users.
The primary function of a robots.txt file is to manage and control the crawling and indexing of a website by search engine bots, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and others. By specifying which pages and directories should be crawled and which should be excluded, webmasters can optimize their site's crawl budget, prevent duplicate content issues, and ensure that sensitive or non-public pages are not indexed.
A typical robots.txt file contains "User-agent" and "Disallow" directives. The "User-agent" directive specifies the name of the web crawler, while the "Disallow" directive lists the URLs or directories that the specified crawler should not access. For example:
User-agent* Googlebot
Disallow. /private-directory/
In this example, the file instructs Googlebot to avoid crawling the content within the "private-directory" folder.
While a robots.txt file is an essential tool for managing web crawlers, it's important to note that it is not a foolproof security measure. Some crawlers may ignore the directives in the file, and it's always a good idea to secure sensitive information using more robust methods, such as password protection or IP restrictions.