Playing the right cards in your website strategy can make all the difference when it comes to driving traffic and revenue. One of the tools that’s coming up in conversations these days, especially with the rise of the IA, is robots.txt. This is a simple text file that helps search engines focus on your most valuable pages. Used correctly, it can improve crawl efficiency, support content discovery, and help maximize your site’s performance. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file that can be placed at the root of your website domain to tell search engine bots which pages they should crawl and which ones to avoid. Think of it as a travel guide but for web crawlers. By guiding crawlers away from low-value areas, it can help search engines focus their crawl resources on your most important content. This allows you, as a publisher, to prioritize traffic to your most relevant content.
Bear in mind that a robots.txt file won’t completely hide your page from search engines and not all of them will follow your instructions. If you want a web page removed from search results, use a noindex directive and allow search engines to access the page so they can see that instruction, or password-protect the page you want to keep private.
How does robots.txt file work?
When a crawler visits a site, it typically checks the robots.txt file (or a cached version of it) before crawling URLs. This provides it with instructions set by you about what areas it can access and what it cannot. The robots.txt file is found at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and looks like this:
A robots.txt file uses a syntax of basic directives that set the ground rules for how bots should act on your site. They are:
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- User-agent: This indicates the name of the bot to which you want to apply the rules (Googlebot, Applebot, Bingbot, etc). If you want your rules to apply to all bots, all you need to do is include an * in this field instead of the name of the bot.
- Disallow: As the name suggests, it tells the bot what pages or files they are not allowed to access. Kind of like a nightclub’s bouncer but for a website.
- Allow: This directive indicates to bots which pages or subdirectories they can crawl, even if the entire directory has a disallow rule.
- Sitemap: Many publishers include a sitemap reference in their robots.txt file, making it easier for search engines to find and crawl important pages across their sites.
For example, if you don’t want bots to crawl your “latest news” page, but you want a specific article to be indexed, your robots.txt line would say something like this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest-news/
Allow: /latest-news/article-name/
How to create a robots.txt file
Let’s make things easier for you. Once you’ve determined the pages you want to block from crawlers, you can use plugins like YoastSEO in WordPress to create and edit your robots.txt file.
To do it manually, you’ll need to open a simple text file, such as Notepad, and save it under the name “robots.txt”. Then, add the directives and upload the file to your root directory.
Finally, after uploading the file, verify it through Google Search Console by checking crawl and indexing reports, and test important URLs using the URL Inspection tool. GCS comes really handy to keep track of your site’s health, crawling & indexing status, and search traffic. Recently, Google Search Central announced they are implemented a new search engine generative IA performance report to keep track of your GEO efforts. Stay tuned for our upcoming article on how to use this report on your strategy!
Why robots.txt matters for publishers?
For publishers, robots.txt can be a useful SEO tool, helping search engines crawl your site more efficiently, discover relevant content, and improve overall site performance. This in turn, can help maximize your ad revenue.
Helps Control Crawl Budget
Search engines allocate a limited “crawl budget” per site. By disallowing low-value pages (like internal search results, duplicate pages, or private files), you guide crawlers toward your relevant content, improving indexing efficiency and site performance.
Improves SEO Performance
Robots.txt files help improve indexing efficiency and prioritize traffic. They help put the focus on your most valuable pages, supporting faster discovery of your content. They also keep crawlers away from low-value URLs like test pages, duplicates, login areas, etc.
Controls Content Scraping by IA Models
You can signal to AI crawlers that they should not access certain content on your site. This option gives you greater control over your content and helps protect it if you’re not comfortable with LLM:er using it. However, if you don’t mind the extra exposure and see generative AI tools as a branding opportunity, you can allow their crawlers on your site as you see fit.
Keep in mind that compliance varies by crawler and depends on whether it respects robots.txt.
Optimize Site Performance
Using robots.txt can help reduce unnecessary bot traffic and server load. By limiting how many pages bots crawl, your server has more resources for real visitors, so pages load faster. This helps your Core Web Vitals, enhancing the user experience.
Best practices for using robots.txt
Having a robots.txt file isn’t a must-have for most websites. However, it can serve as a good SEO strategy to maximize your crawl budget, prevent server overload, and protect certain content. If you opt to use it, you might want to stick to these best practices:
Don’t use robots.txt to hide your content from the SERPs
If your goal is to keep content private or completely remove it from search results, use a noindex tag rather than relying on robots.txt. This is because Google may still index a page if there’s an external link to it, even when Googlebot is disallowed from crawling it through robots.txt.
Avoid blocking any important resources
Be careful not to block any resources like CSS, JavaScript, or images that your site needs for rendering because search engines depend on them to understand your pages layout and functionality.
Do regular tests and updates of your robots.txt file
Issues with your robots.txt can affect your SEO. That’s why it’s important to update your file as you continue creating great content and your site evolves. Testing it can help make sure all your directives are applied correctly and that there’s no interference with the rendering.
Robots.txt as a strategy for publishers: take it or leave it?
Robots.txt is more than a technical SEO file. It’s a guide that determines how bots, crawlers, and IA systems can interact with content on your website. This allows you to prioritize traffic to those valuable pages that deserve the spotlight. For publishers, it is a strategic tool to manage visibility, performance, and content access like a champ, especially in an era where search is changing as we know it.
Learn more about how to increase your traffic in this new age for discoverability with our webinar “Search Reinvented: How Publishers Can Compete in an AI First World”. You can also go one more step further and request a Gratis Webbplatsanalys. This way you’ll get personalized recommendations on how to maximize your revenue and performance for long-term growth.
