What is the purpose of robots.txt in technical SEO?

While there are many aspects of technical SEO that are important to consider, one of the most basic and important is ensuring that search engine crawlers can easily access your website. This includes things like page loading time, proper title tags, and more. Contact us to learn more about gilbertseo.net

The reason you want to ensure that your website can be easily accessed by web crawlers is so that you can optimize your pages for search engines and rank higher in SERPs. This means making sure that your content is relevant and readable by users, that the site loads fast enough, and that it contains only legitimate and useful information. 

There are a few ways to achieve this, including using meta robots tags and setting up redirects. These are two of the most common ways that people use to control which parts of their website can be crawled by search engines. 

Meta robots tags are added to the head> section of your website’s HTML. The content of these tags is used to determine what is and is not allowed for search bots to see. 

These tags can be used to tell search bots to not index a page or not follow any backlinks from that page. For example, if you have a thank you page that does not include any product images or links, then you would want to add the meta name=”robots” content=” index, nofollow”> tag. 

Generally speaking, you’ll find that most SEO experts recommend keeping these meta robots tags within the head> section of your site so that they can be seen by search engine bots. However, there are some cases where it might be more efficient to place these tags within the headers of your HTTP responses so that they can be seen by the search engine’s own crawlers. 

Another way to control what parts of your website can be crawled by search bots is to set a certain crawl budget for your site. This allows you to define how often search engine bots should crawl your website so that they can find the most valuable pages on your site as quickly as possible. 

A crawl budget can also be used to limit the number of query string parameters that can be used in your site’s URLs. This can be important if you have a lot of different URLs that are used to sort or filter lists on your website. 

You can also disallow a large number of individual media resource URLs that might be on your site to help cut down on image theft and bandwidth abuse, for example. This can be useful if you’re trying to cut down on bandwidth usage and spammy traffic from a large number of image-centric crawlers like Googlebot-Image or Googlebot-News. 

In addition to this, you can also disallow certain pages on your website from getting crawled by search engine bots. This is a great tactic to prevent your most important pages from being ignored or ignored entirely in search results, especially if you have a site with a lot of valuable and relevant content that you want to rank highly for.