Five Ways to Avoid Robots Txt Mistakes

by | Aug 17, 2021 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

If you are searching for perfect ways to avoid Robots Txt mistakes, then I suggest reading this article. The various instructions that you come across this article fit the user’s requirements rather well, and are pretty quality.

It is studied that Robots.txt can be ignored by bots and yes, it’s not secure: everyone could see the content of this file. Moreover well-considered robots.txt assists to deliver your content to bots and omit low-priority pages in SERP. While at first glance, giving directories is simple task but any kind of management requires your attention. You can go through common Robots.txt mistakes and ways to avoid them.

avoid mistake

Ignoring disallow directives for particular user-agent block

In case if you have two categories that must be blocked for all crawlers and also one URL that should be available only for Googlebot: This file asks Googlebot to scan the whole website.

You must remember that if you name the specific bot in robots. Txt, it will only obey the directives addressed to it. In order to specify exceptions for Googlebot, you must repeat disallow directives for each user-agent block.

One robots.txt files for different sub-domains

It is reported that one must remember that sub-domain is generally treated as a separate website and thus follows only its own robots.txt directives. In case if your website has a few child domains that serve different purposes. You can try to take the simple way out and create one robots.txt file with the aim to provide your sub-domains from it.

It isn’t that simple and you cannot specify a sub-domain or a domain in a robots.txt file with a wave of a magic wand. Thereby each sub-domain must have the separate robots.txt file.

Feature in Listing of secure directories

Since Robots.txt is simply available for users and harmful bots, don’t add private data. Moreover we do not live in an ideal world, where all competitors respect each other. If you are trying to disallow some private data in robots Txt, you give fast access to your information for bad bots. The only way to keep a directory hidden is to put it behind a password.

It is enumerated that Robots.txt works only if it is present in the root. You require uploading a separate robots.txt for each sub-domain website, where it can be accessed by a search bot.

One must remember that secure data = password-protected data. It is the only quality way to protect such sensitive data like customer credit card details or credentials.

In addition note that Google can index pages blocked in robots.txt if Googlebot finds internal links pointing to these pages. Google will likely use a title from some of the internal links pointing to the URL, but the URL will rarely be illustrated or displayed in SERP since Google has little information about it.

About Forgetting to add directives for specific bots where it’s needed

We learnt that Google’s main crawler is called Googlebot. Moreover, there are 12 more specific spiders each of which has its own name as User-agent and crawls some part of your website for example, Googlebot-News scans applicable content for inclusion on Google News, Googlebot-Image searches for photos and images, etc.

It is said that some of the content you publish may not be applicable for inclusion on SERP. For instance, you want all your pages to appear in Google Search, but you don’t want photos in your personal directory to be crawled. In such a situation, use robots.txt to disallow the user-agent Googlebot-image for craw of the files in the directory while allowing Googlebot to scan all files.

In case if you want ads on all your URLs, but you don’t want those pages to appear in SERP. So, you’d prevent Googlebot from crawling, but permit Media partners-Google bot.

For Adding the relative path to sitemap

Primarily the sitemap helps crawlers in faster indexation, and that’s why it should be submitted on your website. Also, it’s a novel idea to leave a clue to search bot in robots.txt about where your sitemap is placed. Also note that bots cannot reach sitemap files using a relative path, it is said that URL must be absolute.

Feature of Ignoring Slash in a Disallow field

Precisely the search bots won’t respect your robots.txt rules if you miss a slash in the correlated section.

For Forgetting about case sensitivity

We know that the path value in robots.txt is used as a basis to determine whether or not a rule applies to a particular URL on a site. In addition the Directives in the robots.txt file are case-sensitive. Google conveys that you can use only the first few characters instead of the full name in robots.txt directories.

More said that a little text files with directives for search bots in the root folder could immensely affect crawl ability of your URLs and even the entire website. Robots.txt is not as simple as it might seem. If one superfluous slash or missed wildcard could generally block your beneficial pages or vice versa open access to duplicate or private content.

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