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If your robots.txt file returns anything other than a 2xx (success) response code, this may cause issues. A robots.txt file must be located in the root directory of a domain Is not valid for or (non-secure version).The robots.txt is applicable to URLs with the same protocol and subdomain as it, for example: Sitemaps can be included in the robots.txt which can help search engines with page discovery if they have not been submitted via search console. If URLs blocked by robots.txt can be found via internal or external links, then Google may still index them, even though they can’t crawl and see the content on the page. It’s important to note that robots.txt prevents crawling, rather than indexing. If you are looking to prevent search engines from crawling and indexing a development site, using password protection and/or IP restricting are typically better options. The robots.txt can also be used to prevent the crawling of development/staging versions of the site. Similarly, parameters used by a faceted navigation are also often worth blocking. These can be very large and waste crawl budget. If you don’t want to prevent anything from being crawled, then you don’t necessarily need a robots.txt.Ī common practical use of robots.txt is to block search pages from crawling. If an entire site cannot be crawled then it is unlikely to rank well for any searches.īlocking URLs via robots.txt can help avoid duplicate, low-value add or unintended URLs from being accessed improving crawl efficiency.Ī robots.txt file isn’t required for every website. If a page can’t be crawled, search engines cannot see what the page is about, making it less likely to be included in the search results. The robots.txt can be used to prevent pages on a website from being crawled. In this guide, we’ll explore why you should have a robots.txt, what to include, uses, common issues and more. This provides crawling instructions to bots visiting the site, which they voluntarily follow. The robots.txt is a file that sits on the root of a domain, for example:

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