What is robots.txt, and why is it important for search engine optimization (SEO)? Robot.txt is a set of optional directives that tell web crawlers which parts of your website they can access. Most search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, support and use robots.txt to identify web pages to crawl, index, and display in search results.
If you’re having trouble getting your website indexed by search engines, your robots.txt file may be causing the problem. Errors on the Robots.txt file are among the most common technical SEO issues that show up in SEO audit reports and lead to a massive drop in search rankings. Even technical SEO consultants and experienced web developers are susceptible to robot.txt errors.
As such, you must understand two things:
What is robots.txt?
How to use robots.txt in WordPress and other content management systems (CMS)?
This will help you create an SEO-optimized robots.txt file and make it easier for web spiders to crawl and index your web pages.
Let’s dive into the basics of robots.txt. Read on and find out how you can use the robots.txt file to improve your website’s crawling and indexability.
What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt, also known as the Robots Exclusion Standard or Protocol, is a text file located in your website’s root or main directory. It instructs spiders on what parts of your website they can and cannot crawl.

Robots.txt Timeline
The robots.txt file is a standard proposed by the creator of Allweb, Martijn Koster, to regulate how various search engine robots and crawlers access web content. Here is an overview of the development of the robots.txt file over the years:
In 1994, Koster created a web spider that caused malicious attacks on its servers. To protect websites from bad SEO crawlers, Koster developed a robot. text to guide search bots to the right pages and prevent them from reaching certain areas of a website.
In 1997, an internet-draft was created to specify methods for controlling web robots using a robots.txt file. Since then, robot.txt has been used to restrict or funnel a robot spider to select parts of a website.
On July 1, 2019, Google announced that it was working to formalize the Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP) specification and make it a web standard — 25 years after robots.txt was created and adopted by search engine.
The goal was to detail unspecified scenarios for parsing and matching robots.txt to fit modern web standards. This internet draft indicates that:
Several industry efforts have been made over time to expand robot exclusion mechanisms. However, not all web crawlers support these new robots.txt protocols. To fully understand how robots.text works, let’s first define the crawler and answer an important question: how do crawlers work?
What is a Web Crawler and How Does it Work?
A website crawler , also known as a spider bot , site crawler, or search bot , is an Internet crawler typically operated by search engines such as Google and Bing. A spider crawls the web to analyze web pages and ensure that users can retrieve information whenever they need it.
What are web crawlers, and what is their role in technical SEO?
Related Resource: All You Need to Know about Technical SEO
To define the web crawler, you must familiarize yourself with the different types of site crawlers on the web. Each spider robot has a different purpose:
Search Engine Robots
What is a search engine spider? A search engine spider bot is one of the most common SEO crawlers used by search engines to crawl and scrape the Internet. Search engine crawlers use robots.txt SEO protocols to understand your web crawling preferences. Knowing the answer to what is a search engine spider? Gives you an edge to optimize your robot.txt and make sure it works.
Shopping Spider
A commercial site crawler is a tool developed by software solution companies to help website owners collect data from their platforms or public sites. Several companies provide guidelines on creating a web crawler for this purpose. Be sure to partner with a commercial web crawler that maximizes the effectiveness of an SEO crawler to meet your specific needs.
Bot Crawler
A personal website crawler is designed to help businesses and individuals extract data from search results and monitor their website’s performance. Unlike a search engine spider bot, a personal crawler has limited scalability and functionality.
If you’re curious about creating a website crawler that performs specific tasks to support your technical SEO efforts, check out one online guide that shows you how to create a web crawler that runs from your local device.
Desktop Site Crawler
A desktop crawler runs locally from your computer and helps crawl small websites. However, desktop crawlers are not recommended if you crawl tens or hundreds of thousands of web pages. This is because mining on large sites requires custom configuration or proxy servers that a desktop mining bot does not support.
Copyright Bot
A copyright website crawler searches for content that violates copyright law. This type of crawler can be operated by any company or person who owns copyrighted material, whether or not you know how to create a web crawler.
Why is it Important to Know: What are Web Crawlers?
Search bots are usually programmed to search for robots.text, and follow their directions. However, some crawlers, such as spambots, email harvesters, and malicious bots, often ignore the robots.txt SEO protocol and don’t have the best intentions when accessing content on your site.
What is crawler behavior if not a proactive measure to improve your online presence and enhance your user experience? By making an effort to understand the answer to what is a search engine spider? And how it differs from bad site crawlers, you can ensure that a good search engine’s spider can get to your website and prevent unwanted SEO crawlers from ruining your user experience (UX) and rankings.
Imperva’s 8th Annual Bad Bots Report Shows Bad Web Crawler Bots Driven 25.6% of All Site Traffic in 2020, While Good SEO Spiders Driven Only 15.2% of traffic. With the many disastrous activities that bad spider crawl bots are capable of, such as click fraud, account takeovers, content scraping, and spamming, it’s useful to know 1) what web crawler is beneficial to your site. and 2) which bots should you block when creating bot text?
Should Marketers Learn How to Create a Website Crawler?
You don’t necessarily need to learn how to create a website crawler. Leave the technical aspects of SEO crawler development to software solution companies and focus on optimizing your SEO text crawlers instead.
How Do Web Crawlers Work?
In this rapidly changing digital landscape, it is not enough to know what a crawler is to guide the txt optimization of your SEO robots. Besides “what are web crawlers?” you must also answer « how do web crawlers work? Make sure you create robot text with the proper guidelines.
Search spiders are primarily programmed to perform automatic, repetitive web searches to build an index. The index is where search engines store web information to be retrieved and displayed on relevant search results upon a user query.
An internet crawler follows specific processes and policies to improve its website crawling process and reach its cobweb target.
So how exactly does a web crawler work? We’ll take a look.
Discover URLs | Web spiders start crawling the web from a list of URLs, then jump between page links to crawl websites. To improve your site’s crawlability and indexability, be sure to prioritize your website’s navigability, create a clear robots.txt sitemap, and submit robot.txt to Google. |
Explore a List of Seeds | Search engines provide their search engines with a list of seeds or URLs to look at. The search engine spiders then visit each URL on the list, identify all the links on each page, and add them to the list of seeds to visit. Web spiders use sitemaps and previously crawled databases of URLs to crawl more web pages on the web. |
Add to Index | Once a search engine’s spider visits the listed URLs, it locates and displays the content, including text, files, videos, and images, on each web page and adds it to the index. |
Update Index | Search engine spiders consider key signals, such as keywords and content relevance and freshness, when analyzing a web page. Once a web crawler locates changes to your website, it updates its search index accordingly to ensure it reflects the latest version of the webpage. |
According to Google, computer programs determine how to crawl a website. They look at perceived importance and relevance, crawling demand, and the level of interest that search engines and online users have for your website. These factors impact how often an Internet spider crawls your web pages.
How does a web crawler work and ensure that all Google web crawling rules and web crawling requests are met?
To better communicate with a search engine spider on how to crawl a website, technical SEO service providers and WordPress web design experts advise you to create a robots.txt file that indicates your preferences for data mining. SEO robots.txt is one of the protocols that web spiders use to guide their process of Google web crawling and data mining on the Internet.
You can customize your Robots.Txt file to apply to specific Search Robots, restrict access to particular files or web pages, or control your Robots.Txt crawl timeout.
This is what a default SEO Robots.txt looks like:

Explanation:User-agent
The user-agent directive refers to the name of the SEO crawler the command was intended for. This is the first line of any robots.txt format or rule group.
The user-agent command uses a wildcard character or the * symbol. This means that the directive applies to all search robots. Directives can also apply to specific user agents.
Each SEO crawler has a different name. Google’s web crawlers are called Googlebot, Bing’s SEO crawler is identified as BingBot, and Yahoo’s Internet spider is called Slurp.
# Example:1
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
In this example, since * was used, it means that robot.txt is blocking all user agents from accessing the URL.
# Example:2
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
Googlebot was specified as the user agent. All search engines can access the URL except Google’s crawlers.
# Example:3
User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: Slurp Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
Example 3 indicates that all user agents except the Google crawler and the Yahoo Internet spider are allowed to access the URL.
Allow
The robots.txt allow command indicates what content is accessible to the user agent. Google and Bing support the Robots.txt authorization directive.
Remember that the robots.txt authorization protocol must be followed by the path that Google crawlers and other SEO search engines can access. Google crawlers will ignore the robots.txt permission directive if no path is given.
# Example:1
User Agent: * Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
For this example, the robots.txt allow directive applies to all user agents. This means that the robots.txt block all spider search engines from accessing the /wp-admin/ directory except the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php page.
# Example:2 – Avoid Conflicting Directives like this
User-agent: * Allow: /example Disallow: *.php |
When you create a robots.txt directive like this, Google crawlers and search spiders don’t know what to do with the URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com/example.php Unknown what protocol to follow.
To avoid Google’s web crawling issues, avoid using wildcards when using the robot.txt allow and robots disallow directives together.
Disallow
The robots.txt disallow command is used to specify URLs that Google crawlers and web crawlers should not access. Like the robots.txt allow command, the robot.txt disallow directive must also be followed by the path you do not want Google crawlers to access.
# Example:1
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
For this example, the command robots disallow all user agents from accessing the /wp-admin/ directory.
The robots.txt disallow command is used to specify URLs that Google crawlers and web crawlers should not access. Like the robots.txt allow command, the robots.txt disallow directive must also be followed by the path you do not want Google crawlers to access.
# Example:2
User-agent: * Disallow: |
This ban robots.txt command tells a Google crawler and other search robots to crawl the entire website’s Google pages because nothing is forbidden.
Note: Even though this ban robots directive is only two lines long, follow the correct robots.txt format. Don’t write User-agent: * Disallow: on a single line because that’s wrong. When you create robots.txt, each directive should be on a separate line.
# Example:3
User-agent: * Disallow: / |
The symbol / represents the root in the hierarchy of a website. For this example, the robots.txt disallow directive is equivalent to the robot’s disallow all commands. You hide your entire website from Google’s spider and other search bots.
Note: Similar to the example above ( user-agent: * Disallow: ), avoid using a one-line robots.txt syntax ( user-agent: * Disallow: / ) to disallow access to your site website.
A robots.txt format like this user agent: * Disallow: / would confuse a Google crawler and could cause problems parsing the WordPress robots.txt.
Sitemap
The robots.txt sitemap command directs crawlers and Google crawlers to the XML sitemap. The robots.txt sitemap is supported by Bing, Yahoo, Google, and Ask.
As for how to add a sitemap to robots.txt? Knowing the answer to these questions is useful, especially if you want as many search engines as possible to access your sitemap.
# Example:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Sitemap: https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap1.xml Sitemap: https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap2.xml |
In this example, the robots disallow command tells all search robots not to access /wp-admin/. The robots.txt syntax indicates that two sitemaps can be found on the website. When you know how to add a sitemap to robots.txt, you can place multiple XML sitemaps in your robots.txt file.
Crawl-delay
Major spider bots support the robots.txt crawl timeout directive. It prevents a Google crawler and other search engines from overloading a server. The robots.txt crawl delay command allows administrators to specify how long Google crawlers and crawlers wait between each Google crawl request in milliseconds.
# Example:
user-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /calendar/ Disallow: /events/ User-agent: BingBot Disallow: /calendar/ Disallow: /events/ Crawl-delay: 10 Sitemap: https: //yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml |
In this example, the robots.txt crawl timeout directive instructs search bots to wait at least 10 seconds before requesting another URL.
Some web spiders, such as Google Web Crawler, do not support robots.txt crawl timeout commands. Be sure to run your robots.txt syntax checker on a robots.txt checker before submitting robots.txt to Google and other search engines to avoid parsing issues.
On the other hand, Baidu does not support robots’ txt crawl time guidelines, but you can use Baidu’s webmaster tools to control how often your website is crawled. You can also use Google Search Console (GSC) to set the crawler crawl rate.
Host
The host directive tells search bots your preferred mirror domain or the replica of your website hosted on another server. The mirror domain distributes the traffic load and avoids latency and server load on your website.
# Example:
User-agent example: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Host: yourwebsite.com |
The WordPress robots.txt host directive lets you decide whether you want search engines to show yourwebsite.com or www.yourwebsite.com.
End of String Operator
The $ sign indicates the end of a URL and directs a Google crawler on how to crawl a website with parameters. It is placed at the end of the road.
# Example:
User-agent: * Disallow: *.html$ |
In this example, the robots.txt nofollow directive tells a Google crawler and other user agents not to crawl Google URLs of websites that end in .HTML.
This means URLs with parameters like this https://yourwebsite.com/page. HTML ?lang=en would still be included in the Google crawl request since the URL does not end after .HTML.
Comments
Comments serve as a guide for web design and development specialists and are preceded by the sign #. They can be placed at the beginning of a WordPress robots.txt line or after a command. If you place comments after a directive, make sure they are on the same line.
Anything after the # will be ignored by Google’s crawlers and search spiders.
# Example:1- Block access to the /wp-admin/ Directory for all search Robots
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ |
# Example:2
User-agent: *#Applies to all search spiders. Disallow: /wp-admin/#Block access to the /wp-admin/ directory. |
Why Robots.Txt File Used For?
The Robots.txt syntax is used to manage spider crawl traffic to your website. It is crucial to make your website more accessible to search engines and online visitors.
Want to learn how to use robots.txt and create robots.txt for your website? Here are the best ways to improve your SEO performance with robots.txt for WordPress and other CMS:
Wasting your crawl budget and resources on pages with low-value URLs can negatively impact your crawlability and indexability. Don’t wait until your site experiences several technical SEO issues and a significant drop in rankings before you finally prioritize learning how to create robots.txt for SEO.
Master Google robots.txt optimization, and you will protect your website from bad robots and online threats.
Should all Websites Create Robots?text File?
Not all websites need to create a robots.txt file. Search engines like Google have systems in place on how to crawl the Google pages of the website, and they automatically ignore duplicate or unimportant versions of a page.
However, Pro SEO specialists recommend creating a robots.txt file and implementing robots.txt best practices to enable faster and better web crawling and indexing by Google’s crawlers and search engines.
As mentioned above, knowing how to edit robots.txt for SEO gives you a significant advantage. Most importantly, it gives you peace of mind that your website is protected from malicious attacks by bad bots.
Location of robots.txt in WordPress
Ready to create robots.txt? The first step to hitting your target cobweb budget is learning to find robots.txt on your website. You can find the WordPress robots.txt location by going to your site URL and adding the parameter /robots.txt file.
For example: https://mnseoultrapro.com/robots.txt
This is an example of a search engine-optimized Google robots text file. The robots.txt syntax contains the robots.txt deny directory, and the robots.txt allows commands to guide Google’s web crawlers and search spiders to which pages to crawl and index.
In addition to the allow and disallow robots.txt guidelines, the robots.txt directory for Google and search robots also includes a robots.txt sitemap to direct web crawlers to the XML sitemap and avoid wasting the cobweb target exploration budget.
Where is the Robots.txt in WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular CMS, powering around 40% of all websites. No wonder many website owners want to learn how to edit the WordPress robots.txt file. Some even hire WordPress web design professionals to help optimize robots.txt for WordPress.
Where is robots.txt in WordPress? Follow these steps to access your WordPress robots.txt file:
For Yoast
Here’s

You can now view your WordPress robots.txt file and edit the WordPress robots.txt directory.

As for how to access robots.txt in WordPress and update your disallow robots.txt guidelines to show the robots.txt restricted URL? Just follow the same process you used to determine where robots.txt is in WordPress.
Remember to save any changes you make to your robots.txt for WordPress to ensure that your robots.txt no index and robots.txt allow commands are up to date.

For Rankmath

Add Code in Your Robots.txt and save changes.

How to Find the Robots.txt File in Magento
Apart from the common question of how to access robots.txt in WordPress, many website owners also want to learn how to access, modify and optimize Magento robots.txt to communicate robots.txt restricted URL better to search spiders…
Magento is an e-commerce platform with built-in PHP designed to help web developers create SEO-optimized e-commerce websites. And how to find Magento robots.txt?
What about creating robots.txt in Magento? The exact process applies when you create a robots.txt file for Magento. You can also click on the “Reset to Default” button if you need to restore the default instructions.
Robots.txt Best Practices
Learning to access robots.txt in WordPress and edit robots.txt on various platforms are the first steps to optimizing your robots.txt no index and robots.txt allow directives.
Common Robots.txt Errors You Should Avoid
Take note of these common errors when creating the robots.txt file and make sure to avoid them to improve your site’s crawling and online performance:
❌ Place the robots.txt directives on a single line. Each robots.txt directive should always be on a separate line to provide clear instructions for crawlers on how to crawl a website.
Incorrect: User-agent: * Forbid: /
Incorrect: User-agent: * Forbid:
❌ Failed to send robots.txt file to Google. Always submit your updated robots.txt file to Google. Whether you’ve made minor changes, such as adding robots.txt to deny all commands to specific user agents or removing robots not allowing all directives, hit the submit button. This way, Google will be notified of any changes you have made to your robots.txt file.
❌ Placing bad robots.txt directives without an index. This puts your website at risk of not being crawled by search bots, losing valuable traffic, and worse, suffering a sudden drop in search rankings.
❌ Do not place the robot text file in the root directory. Placing your robots.txt file in subdirectories could make it untraceable by web crawlers.
Incorrect: https://www.yourwebsite.com/assets/robots.txt
Correct: https://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
❌ Improper use of robots.txt disallows all commands, wildcards, trailing slashes, and other directives. Always run your robots.txt file on a robots.txt validator before saving and submitting it to Google and other search engines so you don’t get robots.txt errors.
❌ Rely on the robots.txt file generator to generate the robots.txt file. While a robots.txt file generator is a useful tool, relying solely on it without performing manual checks on the robots.txt denies all directives, robots.txt allows commands and user agents on your robot’s file .txt is a bad practice.
Using a robots.txt file generator to generate robots.txt is acceptable if you have a small website. But if you own an e-commerce website or offer many services, be sure to get expert help to create and optimize your robots.txt file.
❌ Ignore robots.txt validator reports. A robots.txt validator is there for a reason. So optimize your robots.txt checker and other tools to ensure your efforts to optimize robots.txt for SEO are on the right track.
Take Control of Your Crawl Budget
Dealing with robots.txt optimization and other technical SEO issues can be nerve-wracking, especially if you don’t have the resources, manpower, and capabilities to complete the necessary tasks. Don’t stress yourself out dealing with website issues that professionals could fix quickly.
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