What is robots.txt?

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1. robots.txt is the robots exclusion standard (robot.txt, robots.txt, or robots exclusion standard) that describes how to inform web robots (such as search engine robots) about which parts of your website should not be processed or scanned.
2. The robots.txt file located in the root directory of a website dictates what individual bots can and cannot do while crawling that site – including whether they are allowed to follow links to other pages on the same domain, crawl content within directories, etc.
3. The rules defined in robots.txt files must include “Disallow:” lines for each user agent that is disallowed access.
   robots.txt is a text file that tells robots which pages on the sites they can crawl and which ones they cannot. You can block bots from crawling certain parts of your site or instruct them only to crawl specific files, such as robots.txt.
4. Robots are smart enough to interpret robots.txt instructions just like you would do with a .htaccess file on Apache web servers, but it is always better to practice using robots.txt because robots know how to ask for permission to access a website on the first visit.
5. robots.txt is a file that tells robots like Google’s crawler (Googlebot) which parts of your site should not be accessed or scanned for content by robots/spiders.
6. You can use robots.txt to control robots crawl and index your site, as well as control access to sensitive data.
   Additionally, you may also want to reference robots.txt in any web pages on your site that use “no-index” meta tags if those pages do not need to be indexed and listed in the search results.
7. The most common reason for creating a robots.txt file is to prevent duplicate content issues.
8. Examples

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Allow: /help/images/** ## robots.txt allow for robots to index all images in a folder called ‘images’ within a directory named ‘help’.

User-agent: Googlebot ## Allows Googlebot to crawl links found in posts and comments.
Disallow:
Allow /comments/feed/
Allow: /posts/feed/

User-agent: * ## Allows all robots to index the entire website.
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”sidebar-blog”][/vc_column][/vc_row]