Robots txt Site map

Learn how to create a Robots.txt file for your website using an example and improve search engine visibility.

What is a Robots.txt Site Map?

A Robots.txt Site Map is a text file that is placed on a website to inform search engine crawlers which pages are allowed to be crawled and indexed. It is used to give instructions to web robots (also known as crawlers or bots) that visit your website. The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of a website and can be used to provide instructions to different types of robots. It can also be used to provide additional information for human visitors.

The main purpose of the robots.txt file is to tell search engines which pages to crawl and which pages to ignore. It is important to note that the robots.txt file does not guarantee that a page will be indexed, but it does help crawlers understand what pages to crawl and which pages to ignore. For example, if you have a page that contains sensitive information that you don’t want indexed, you can use the robots.txt file to tell crawlers to not crawl that page.

A robots.txt file should consist of one or more rules that specify which pages should be crawled and which pages should be ignored. Each rule should have a “User-agent” field, which tells search engine crawlers which type of robot should follow the rule. For example, if you want to tell the Googlebot crawler to ignore a certain page, you would include a rule with the following:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /sensitive-page.html

This tells the Googlebot crawler to ignore the page “sensitive-page.html”. You can also use the robots.txt file to specify a site map. A site map is a list of URLs on a website that should be crawled by search engine crawlers. To specify a site map, you would include a rule with the following:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

This tells search engine crawlers to crawl the specified site map. A site map can be in the form of an XML file or a text file that contains a list of URLs. The XML file should be formatted according to the sitemaps.org protocol. This ensures that search engine crawlers are able to correctly interpret the sitemap and correctly crawl the specified URLs.

In summary, the robots.txt file is a text file that is placed on a website to inform search engine crawlers which pages are allowed to be crawled and indexed. It can also be used to provide instructions to different types of robots, specify which pages should be ignored, and specify a site map. It is important to note that the robots.txt file does not guarantee that a page will be indexed, but it does help crawlers understand what pages to crawl and which pages to ignore.