How to keep crawler traffic under control

A well-designed robots.txt file is essential to direct search engine crawlers and not unnecessarily burden your server while still indexing important pages. By excluding irrelevant or sensitive parts of your site with clear instructions, you protect both your server performance and your SEO results. This article explains in simple terms what robots.txt is, why it is important for SEO, which rules you can use, and a ready-made example file to apply right away.

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file is a plain text file that is located in the root of your website, for example https://www.example.com/robots.txt. When a crawler visits your site, it first checks for this file and reads the rules to determine which URLs can and cannot be crawled. Note that robots.txt is a hint, not a hard mandate; some bots may ignore the rules.

Why robots.txt is important for SEO

A smart robots.txt file prevents crawlers from indexing unimportant or sensitive pages, such as admin areas or test pages. This helps avoid duplication of content and increases crawl efficiency: search engines spend more time on the pages that are important. Additionally, the crawl-delay rule allows you to moderate the speed of crawls, preventing your server from becoming overloaded during peak times.

Important robots.txt directives

In a robots.txt file, you will typically use the following basic directives:

User-agent: [crawler-name]
Disallow: /path/to/excluded-directory/
Allow: /path/to/allowed-file.html
Crawl-delay: 10

Here is an overview of the most common directives:

• User-agent: specifies which crawler the rules apply to, such as Googlebot or * for all crawlers.
• Disallow: specifies paths that should not be crawled, for example /admin/ for your admin area.
• Allow: specifies exceptions within excluded directories, such as a sitemap.
• Crawl-delay: (optional) sets the number of seconds between successive requests, which reduces server load.
• Sitemap: links to your XML sitemap, so crawlers know immediately where to find your entire collection of pages.

Common pitfalls

An incorrect robots.txt can accidentally block important pages. Therefore, always check after making changes that you have not excluded essential directories. Use Google Search Console to test and validate your robots file via the “robots.txt tester”. Also, remember that robots.txt only prevents crawling, not indexing—use “noindex” meta tags on specific pages for indexing.

Sample robots.txt file

Here’s an example that covers common situations:

# General rules for all bots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/

# Allow specific files
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

# Set a crawl delay for Googlebot
User-agent: Googlebot
Crawl-delay: 5

# Sitemap location
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Step-by-step implementation

1. Create a robots.txt file in the root of your website.

2. Add the rules as in the example above.

3. Upload the file to https://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

4. Test in Google Search Console with the robots.txt tester.

5. Monitor in your server logs and Search Console if crawls are going according to plan.

Conclusion

A well-managed robots.txt file helps optimize your server performance, protects sensitive parts of your site, and increases crawl efficiency, which ultimately benefits your SEO ranking. Adapt the sample rules to your situation and test thoroughly to ensure you keep important content accessible to search engines.

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