What is Robot txt?

A robots.txt file (part of the "Robots Exclusion Protocol") is a plain text file placed at the root of a website (e.g., https://www.example.com/robots.txt). It provides voluntary instructions to web crawlers—like Googlebot, Bingbot, and others—about which pages or directories they should crawl or avoid

What is a robots.txt file? (5‑minute explanation)

A robots.txt file (part of the "Robots Exclusion Protocol") is a plain text file placed at the root of a website (e.g., https://www.example.com/robots.txt). It provides voluntary instructions to web crawlers—like Googlebot, Bingbot, and others—about which pages or directories they should crawl or avoid (en.wikipedia.org).

🛠️ What It Does

  • Manages crawler traffic: Helps prevent bots from flooding your site with requests, which reduces server load (developers.google.com).

  • Controls indexing: You can exclude sections like staging areas, admin pages, or private files from being indexed .

⚠️ Limitations

  • Voluntary compliance: Good bots respect it, but malicious ones may ignore it or even use it to find restricted content (en.wikipedia.org).

  • Does not hide content: Even if crawling is blocked, URLs can still appear in search results without a description. To completely prevent indexing, you need noindex tags or password protection (developers.google.com).

📝 Example

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

  • User-agent: * applies instructions to all crawlers.

  • Disallow: /private/ blocks them from that folder.

  • Allow: / lets them crawl the rest.

  • Sitemap: helps bots find your sitemap (yoast.com, seerinteractive.com, en.wikipedia.org).

📌 When to Use It

  1. Crawl budgeting: Large sites can help search engines focus on important pages by blocking irrelevant ones (backlinko.com).

  2. Prevent accessing private/staging areas: Common for login/admin directories, internal search pages, etc. .

  3. Better bot etiquette: Reduces unwanted bot activity but isn’t a security measure (cloudflare.com).

🔍 Best Practices

  • Always place it at the site root and name it exactly robots.txt, lowercase included (yoast.com).

  • Use noindex meta tags if you need to hide pages from search results completely (developers.google.com).

  • Don’t rely on robots.txt for confidential content—it’s publicly accessible and not a valid security measure.