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We shall be looking at a particular aspect of SEO in the form of robot.txt SEO. It is Albert Einstein who said that; “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” We shall try and explain simply and extensively in this article all that you need to know about business2community.com robot.txt, its importance to your Search Engine optimization campaign and more.
It is a great thing when you get search engine crawlers go through your website and index the content on it. Though this is the case there may be those pages that you do not want to be indexed as they may seem like duplicate content on your website and may result to you being penalized. If you want to keep some pages of your online content hidden and excluded from being crawled, then a robots.txt file is the way to go. Through a robots.txt file you will be able to tell search engines which files they should avoid.
What Is Robot.txt?
As the name suggests, this is a text file that acts as a notice to robots and search engine crawlers informing them of what not to look at and what to overlook. Robots are obedient and will heed to the notice on the robot.txt file and avoid those files and folders not to be indexed by the search engine. Though this is the case, it is important to remember that the robot.txt file will not act as a firewall or a layer of protection for sensitive data. It is dangerous to have sensitive information online, even if you have the robot.txt file on your website. This is because it will not act as a protection preventing indexing in search engines.Now that we have that out of the way, we need to understand that where it is located is crucial for search engines to find it. Search engines will not go out of their way to search for the robots.txt file, but will go first to the main directory and if it is not there, the search engine will simply go ahead and index your whole site.
How Does The Robot.Txt File Work For Your SEO Campaign
Now that we have a clear understanding about what Robot.txt file is and how it works, the next important thing is to take a look at how to make it work for your Search Engine Optimization campaign. As intimated to above, crawling through a website takes time by the crawlers and the faster they crawl through your site the faster your site is. The converse is also true; when it takes a while to crawl through your website then your users will bear the brunt therefore hurting their user experience and eventually bringing your raking on search engines down. Search Engine optimization works to ensure a higher ranking for your website. This has major implications on it, because as soon as you add new content to your website they will not be seen quickly and this will eventually hurt your SEO efforts.It is in light of this information that it is important to use robots.txt files for your website. With their help you will be able to help search engine crawlers avoid unimportant and similar pages that are on your site. Other than directing the search engine crawlers from pages that you don’t want them to crawl, robots.txt will also help in other regards when it comes to your SEO campaign.
Unfinished Pages
There are times where you need to work on a particular page that you feel you have not really handled it as you should have. Though this is the case, there is a way of saving your audience the trouble of having to go through an unfinished page that may leave them confused and even discourage them from continuing being your audience. Through robots.txt files you will be able to rework on those parts of your websites that you feel need work. This will help keep your ranking high through your SEO efforts and at the same time, you get to improve on the quality and content on your site.Conclusion
To get a better picture on how robot.txt files work, here is a video which explains how robots work and just how you can get to use this information to optimize your site for better ranking on your search engine.Robots.txt files will help improve the working of your site as through it you can tell crawlers what to index and what to leave out. This means that they will move through your site quickly indexing it. In turn this will help in allowing visitors to your site to quickly and easily view content on your website. This will leave your visitors happy as they navigate through your site as it will be fast, which is an important hallmark in ranking for your website on search engines results pages. Thanks to the robot.txt file you will be able to work on upgrading pages on your site without having to display the page to the world as you do so.
As you go about setting out the infrastructure of your website it is very important that you make a clear distinction between public pages and pages that you may want to keep private. This way and with the help of robots.txt file you will be able to tell the website crawlers which pages should be overlooked.