If you’re losing traffic to your website make sure that robots.txt is not blocking search engine crawlers. Its effective presence not only increase traffic but if not implemented correctly then it will also decrease or prevent search engine to crawl your website. That’s why it’s important to use Robots.text file correctly on your website.
Search engine bots (software) or crawlers (scanners) can scan or crawl everything on your website. Even if you don’t submit the website for indexing or submit your content, still it will find out the website or blog and display it on the search engines, when someone searches the exact term or related keywords.
Robot.txt file guide search engine, what are those pages or posts in websites not need to crawl and which ones are to display on the search results.
For example, you can disallow login pages, plugin pages or media, and many other background pages in WordPress that started with wp-admin related.
Allow mean – Crawl(read) or read. and Disallow mean don’t read and display.
Example of roboto.txt file:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /readme.html
Disallow: /refer/
Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsitename.com/post-sitemap.xml
And using sitemap.xml in the roboto.txt also makes it easy for crawlers to find out the places posts, pages, and categories to crawl.
This file exists in your public_html directory, after installing WordPress. Even if not there you can create that file on your own in notepad and then upload it. When you do it you have to name your file Roboto.txt (.txt is a text editor or text-related extension), which means it’s a text file that search engine bots can crawl.
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On the internet, there are not only search engine bots that are important to allow but, on the internet, there are various types of bots, many spammy and data scraping bots also exist. And you can also block them separately in the roboto.txt file.
But it’s important that search engine bots are allowed to crawl your posts, pages or media and display them on the search results. And don’t display background pages that are not important for the users. Background pages also mean your code pages such as function.