Open a website for indexing Robots Txt

Learn how to create a robots.txt file to control search engine bots and ensure your website is properly indexed. Includes an example.

What is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file used by websites to tell web robots (most commonly search engine robots) which pages on the website should not be crawled or indexed. The file is placed in the root directory of the website and named robots.txt.

Robots.txt is not a requirement for search engine robots but it is a good practice to have one in place. If a web robot visits a website and finds a robots.txt file, it will first read the file before crawling the website. If a website doesn't have a robots.txt file, it is likely that the web robot will crawl the entire website, including pages that the website owner doesn't want to be indexed.

A robots.txt file consists of one or more records, each containing a set of field-value pairs. Each record is a separate line in the file. The fields and their values indicate to the web robot which pages on the website should not be crawled or indexed. Here is an example of a robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /admin/
Allow: /

This robots.txt file tells web robots that they should not crawl any pages in the cgi-bin, tmp, and admin directories, but they are allowed to crawl all other pages. It is important to note that the robots.txt file is only a suggestion and not a requirement, so the web robot can choose to ignore the file and crawl the entire website. It is also important to note that the robots.txt file does not prevent pages from being indexed; it only tells web robots not to crawl the specified pages.

It is recommended to keep the robots.txt file up to date and to check it regularly to make sure that it is still valid. If the robots.txt file is changed, it is important to notify web robots so that they can re-crawl the website and update their index accordingly. This can be done by sending an HTTP header with the Last-Modified date.