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Robots.txt

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Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file - Webmaster Tools Help. A robots.txt file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers. The file uses the Robots Exclusion Standard, which is a protocol with a small set of commands that can be used to indicate access to your site by section and by specific kinds of web crawlers (such as mobile crawlers vs desktop crawlers).

What is robots.txt used for? Non-image files For non-image files (that is, web pages) robots.txt should only be used to control crawling traffic, typically because you don't want your server to be overwhelmed by Google's crawler or to waste crawl budget crawling unimportant or similar pages on your site. You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because other pages might point to your page, and your page could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file. Image files robots.txt does prevent image files from appearing in Google search results. Basics - Webmaster Tools Help. Crawling Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web.

The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. How does Google find a page? Google uses many techniques to find a page, including: Following links from other sites or pages Reading sitemaps How does Google know which pages not to crawl? Pages blocked in robots.txt won't be crawled, but still might be indexed if linked to by another page.

Improve your crawling Use these techniques to help Google discover the right pages on your site: Submit a sitemap. Using a robots.txt file. Using a robots.txt file Posted by Vanessa Fox A couple of weeks ago, we launched a robots.txt analysis tool. This tool gives you information about how Googlebot interprets your robots.txt file. You can read more about the robots.txt Robots Exclusion Standard, but we thought we'd answer some common questions here. What is a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file provides restrictions to search engine robots (known as "bots") that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages.

Does my site need a robots.txt file? Only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. Where should the robots.txt file be located? The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain. How do I create a robots.txt file? You can create this file in any text editor. What should the syntax of my robots.txt file be? The simplest robots.txt file uses two rules: User-Agent. .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy.

The Web Robots Pages. In a nutshell Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say Before it does so, it firsts checks for and finds: User-agent: * Disallow: / The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots.

The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site. There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt: robots can ignore your /robots.txt. So don't try to use /robots.txt to hide information. See also: The details The /robots.txt is a de-facto standard, and is not owned by any standards body.

In addition there are external resources: The /robots.txt standard is not actively developed. The rest of this page gives an overview of how to use /robots.txt on your server, with some simple recipes. How to create a /robots.txt file. Robots exclusion standard. The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to advising cooperating web crawlers and other web robots about accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is different from, but can be used in conjunction with, Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

History[edit] The standard was proposed by Martijn Koster,[1][2] when working for Nexor[3] in February, 1994[4] on the www-talk mailing list, the main communication channel for WWW-related activities at the time. It quickly became a de facto standard that present and future web crawlers were expected to follow; most complied, including those operated by search engines such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. About the standard[edit] A robots.txt file covers one origin. Disadvantages[edit] Alternatives[edit]

Robots.txt Tutorial. How to Create Robots.txt Files Use our Robots.txt generator to create a robots.txt file. Analyze Your Robots.txt File Use our Robots.txt analyzer to analyze your robots.txt file today. Google also offers a similar tool inside of Google Webmaster Central, and shows Google crawling errors for your site. Example Robots.txt Format Allow indexing of everything User-agent: * Disallow: or User-agent: * Allow: / Disallow indexing of everything User-agent: * Disallow: / Disawllow indexing of a specific folder User-agent: * Disallow: /folder/ Disallow Googlebot from indexing of a folder, except for allowing the indexing of one file in that folder User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /folder1/ Allow: /folder1/myfile.html Background Information on Robots.txt Files Robots.txt files inform search engine spiders how to interact with indexing your content.

When you block URLs from being indexed in Google via robots.txt, they may still show those pages as URL only listings in their search results. Crawl Delay.