You know the significant impact that these few lines of code can have on the way your site will be crawled. But  it is sometimes complicated to access it simply or to identify the people on the tech side who can modify it quickly . As a result, you are not exploiting robots.txt to its full potential.

In this article, we will see the best practices for robots.txt and the mistakes to avoid. We will also reveal to you at the end of the article, with a demo in support, how to modify this file in a few clicks with our EdgeSEO solution.

Robots.txt: the starting point for an optimized crawl budget

As you already know, the robots.txt file is a text file used by websites to communicate with search engine crawlers aka “Google Bot”. It provides guidelines on which areas of the site the robots are allowed to crawl or not. Positioned at the root of the domain,  the robots.txt file acts as a guide for the robots, helping them understand which parts of the site are accessible and which should be avoided, thus optimizing the crawling of your site.

In other words, robots.txt should allow you to optimize your “crawl budget” to maximize the number of pages crawled by bots, which are important for your business. Remember, the first step to reach a first position in Google search results is for the bot to discover your pages. Without crawling, no indexing and without indexing no positioning and therefore no SEO traffic.

Best practices

Now let’s look at some best practices for robots.txt.

• The robots.txt file must be placed at the root of your website. For example, for the site www.nike.com/, the robots.txt file must be accessible at the address  https://www.nike.com/robots.txt . This is a convention, if you do not place it at the root, it will not be taken into account. Similarly, the robots.txt syntax must be scrupulously respected.
• A robots.txt file contains groups of rules. Each group begins with a “User-agent” line that specifies which crawler the rules apply to, followed by “Disallow” or “Allow” lines that specify the paths that the crawlers can or cannot crawl.

• You can use wildcards such as “*” to represent any number of characters, or “$” to indicate the end of a URL.

• Please note that the rules in the robots.txt file are case sensitive. For example, “Disallow: /product.html” applies to “https://nike.com/product.html” but not to “nike.com/PRODUCT.html”.
• You can use the “Sitemap” directive to specify the location of your XML Sitemap file. This can help crawlers discover your site’s content more quickly.
• You can use rules to block crawling of specific file types, such as images or PDF documents.

But above all… the mistakes to avoid

• The robots.txt file is public and readable by Internet users. Never use robots.txt to block access to sensitive or private information. Since the file is public, this could expose this information. You can also block access to Internet users via the .htaccess file as Fnac does  https://www.fnac.com/robots.txt
• Using rules that are too broad, like Disallow: /, which block the entire site. This can prevent search engines from indexing your site. Or even passing the robots.txt from preprod to production with the Disallow: / (we see this one regularly  )
• Block CSS  or  JavaScript files   that are essential for rendering the page. This can prevent search engines from understanding and indexing the content properly.
• Using conflicting rules: For example, using a Disallow rule to block a URL, then an Allow rule to allow it in the same user agent group.

If you want to know more about robots.txt, you can  consult Google’s guide which gives all the useful information about it . You can also  test the validity of your file, from this page .

Why is robots.txt so important in SEO?

In SEO, robots.txt  is important to optimize your crawl budget . If Google’s bot spends an hour a day on your site, your goal is for it to discover the pages you want to position in the search results. There’s no point in it crawling pages that aren’t interesting.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to discover when analyzing your logs that Google may be looping on pages that should be blocked in your robots.txt. Also, remember that if you give the right information to Google’s bot, it will be efficient and it is your overall indexing performance that will be optimized. This is especially true if you manage sites with several million pages.

It can also save you bandwidth on your servers by blocking certain bots that shouldn’t crawl your pages.

Take back control of your robots.txt!

Setting up rules for your robots.txt is not complicated. You can ask your agency for advice to get the right recommendations based on your context. However, accessing and modifying it can be more complicated. Indeed, how many SEOs struggle to (let’s not mince words) apply their modifications, whether it is related to the limits of the CMS or the difficulty of identifying the right contact, without spending hours on it. A modification that takes a few minutes can turn into a few days or even several weeks!

If this is your case, there are now  solutions that allow you to regain control over your robots.txt and more generally over your SEO roadmap . EdgeSEO allows you to directly modify the code of your site “at the Edge” and to bypass the technical limitations of your CMS. We provide you with a “user friendly” dashboard to deploy your SEO recommendations simply. You thus gain in agility and autonomy (and  can easily test all your optimizations ).

You want to get ahead of your competitors and implement our EdgeSEO solution, request a demo!

Adding, editing your robots.txt file has never been easier. In just a few seconds, you will be able to deploy your rules and thus easily test new strategies.