SEO vs SEM: Which is Right for Your Melbourne Business?
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The choice between SEO vs SEM is a crucial decision for those businesses in Melbourne…
A short journey to understanding the power of robots.txt; best practices to improve your website’s SEO performance
Understanding how to effectively use the robots.txt file is a vital part of your SEO strategy. It allows you to optimise the way search engines crawl your site, helping to prevent unnecessary resources from being wasted on unimportant pages. As a result, this file can play a significant role in improving your overall SEO performance. By ensuring your crawl budget is used effectively, you can focus search engine bots on the pages that matter most, such as your key content and product pages.
The robots.txt file is a plain text document placed in the root directory of your website. Its primary purpose is to guide search engine bots (or crawlers) about which parts of your website they can access and which they should ignore. This can help manage crawler traffic, prevent overloading your server, and optimise your website’s performance in search engine results.
The structure of a robots.txt file is quite simple and includes the following main directives:
User-agent: Specifies which search engine crawler the rule applies to. For instance, Googlebot is Google’s crawler, Bingbot is Bing’s, and so on. Using the asterisk symbol () targets all crawlers.
Disallow: Blocks the crawlers from accessing certain pages or directories.
Allow: Allows access to specific URLs, even if a parent directory has been disallowed.
Sitemap: Directs crawlers to the location of your XML Sitemap, making it easier for search engines to index your content.
It’s essential to remember that the robots.txt file is case-sensitive, meaning that Disallow: /photo/ is not the same as Disallow: /Photo/. Always be precise when creating your rules, and be aware of the implications of case sensitivity.
When multiple rules apply to a given URL, search engines follow a set hierarchy to determine which rule takes precedence. Here are the two key principles that guide how rules are applied:
1. Most Specific Rule: Search engines will follow the rule that matches the greatest number of characters in the URL. For example, if you disallow access to the “/downloads/” directory but allow “/downloads/free/”, the latter rule will take precedence since it is more specific. This means Google will crawl “/downloads/free/” but block all other URLs under “/downloads/”.
2. Least Restrictive Rule: When two or more rules apply to a URL with equal specificity, search engines will follow the least restrictive rule. This ensures that they can access the content unless explicitly instructed otherwise.
Search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot, crawl websites to discover and index content, enabling it to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, every website has a limited crawl budget—the number of pages a search engine bot can crawl within a given time. This is especially crucial for large websites with many pages, as unnecessary crawling can prevent important pages from being indexed.
If you don’t effectively manage the robots.txt file, search engine bots may waste their crawl budget on irrelevant pages, such as “Contact Us” pages, search filters, or product variations that hold little SEO value. Worse still, they may fail to crawl essential pages that need to be indexed, causing a drop in rankings and visibility.
A well-optimised robots.txt file helps ensure that bots prioritise the right pages. It also protects sensitive sections of your website (like login pages or private areas) from being crawled while simultaneously blocking crawlers from indexing pages with duplicate or thin content. For businesses relying on e-commerce or content-heavy websites, this file becomes a powerful tool in the SEO toolbox.
When determining whether a page should be crawled or not, ask yourself: “Does this page add SEO value to my website?” If the answer is no, it’s best to block the page from being crawled. Below are some examples of when you should use the robots.txt file:
1. URLs with query parameters: Internal search results, faceted navigation, or any URLs generated by filters are not typically useful to search engines and can create hundreds of duplicate pages. Blocking these pages helps preserve your crawl budget.
2. Private areas of the site: Sections such as login pages, admin areas, or internal company resources should be restricted from search engine access.
3. JavaScript files: JavaScript files that do not impact the core content or user experience of your site can be blocked.
4. Bots or AI scrapers: Many bots crawl websites for content that they can use for training AI models or scraping data. By blocking these bots, you protect your server resources and content from being misused.
Let’s dive into examples of how you can use robots.txt for each case:
One of the most common uses for the robots.txt file is to prevent search engines from crawling internal search result pages. These pages are generally filled with non-unique content and can produce endless variations. On WordPress sites, for instance, URLs for internal search pages may look like “https://www.example.com/?s=searchterm”. Blocking these types of pages saves precious crawl budget.
E-commerce sites often allow users to filter products by various attributes (e.g., price, colour, brand), resulting in numerous faceted navigation URLs. These pages create endless variations of URLs, which are typically unnecessary for search engine crawlers. Blocking these URLs in the robots.txt file helps prevent duplicate content issues and improves crawl efficiency. However, in some cases, faceted navigation may be part of your SEO strategy, particularly if you’re targeting general product keywords. In that case, you’ll need to carefully evaluate which filters to block.
Many websites host PDF documents, such as whitepapers or product guides. If these files aren’t optimised for search engines or don’t provide any SEO value, it’s often best to block them from being crawled. This ensures that search engine bots focus on crawling your primary content pages rather than wasting time on PDFs. Blocking PDFs can also prevent the issue of content duplication, as many PDFs may already exist elsewhere on the web.
Sometimes, entire sections of a website need to be blocked from being crawled. For example, if you have a directory for form submissions (e.g., “/form/submissions/”), it’s best to block this directory using the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file. This prevents search engines from crawling and indexing unnecessary pages, which would otherwise waste your crawl budget.
For websites that offer user accounts, such as e-commerce or membership sites, it’s essential to block crawlers from accessing sensitive areas. Pages like “/myaccount/orders/” or “/myaccount/profile/” hold personal information that doesn’t need to be indexed by search engines. You can still allow crawlers to index the main /myaccount/ page if necessary, while blocking the specific subdirectories that hold sensitive user data.
Not all JavaScript files are critical to how your website renders. In many cases, scripts used for tracking, analytics, or third-party integrations don’t need to be crawled. By blocking these files in the robots.txt file, you can free up valuable crawl budget for more critical pages and resources.
AI chatbots and scrapers often crawl websites without permission, using your content for training their models or scraping data for third-party use. These bots can also put unnecessary strain on your server. Blocking these crawlers helps preserve your resources and protect your content from being misused. Site owners can easily block known bots by adding them to the robots.txt file, ensuring that these crawlers cannot access the site’s data.
Adding a Sitemap directive in the robots.txt file is a best practice that ensures search engines quickly find and index your most important content. The Sitemap directive tells search engines where to locate your XML sitemap, which contains a comprehensive list of the URLs that should be crawled and indexed. By explicitly pointing to your sitemap, you can help search engines prioritise the pages you want them to focus on.
The Crawl-Delay directive can be useful for websites that experience heavy traffic or limited server resources. While Google doesn’t recognise the Crawl-Delay directive, other search engines such as Bing and Yandex do. This directive instructs bots to wait a certain number of seconds before requesting another page, helping to prevent server overload during crawling.
Even if you carefully craft your robots.txt file, it’s still important to test and validate it to ensure it works as expected. You can use tools like Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester to check for errors or misconfigurations. This tool can help you verify whether the file is blocking or allowing the right URLs and whether there are any conflicts in your directives.
If your website has multiple subdomains, each subdomain should have its own robots.txt file. This is because search engines treat subdomains as separate entities. However, if you prefer centralised management, you can create a robots.txt file on the root domain and set up redirects from subdomains to the root file. This ensures consistency across all subdomains while simplifying updates and maintenance.
Having a well-configured robots.txt file is an essential aspect of effective SEO strategy and website management. By carefully curating which pages search engines can crawl, you ensure that the most important pages on your site get the attention they deserve while preventing search engines from wasting resources on irrelevant or duplicate content. This not only helps to manage the crawl budget effectively but also ensures that the performance of your website remains optimal by reducing unnecessary server load.
Furthermore, a proper robots.txt file provides an extra layer of control over how search engines interact with your website. Whether it’s blocking unimportant pages, protecting sensitive areas, or ensuring that multimedia resources like PDFs and images are handled correctly, using robots.txt helps to enhance your overall site structure in the eyes of search engines.
Regularly reviewing and updating your robots.txt file is just as important as setting it up correctly in the first place. As your website evolves and new content is added, the robots.txt file needs to reflect these changes to maintain its effectiveness. Tools such as Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester can help identify any issues and ensure that your file is working as intended.
In summary, robots.txt is more than just a technical file for webmasters—it is a powerful tool that allows you to control and optimise how search engines view and interact with your site. With a well-managed robots.txt file, you can focus search engines on what matters most, protect sensitive content, and make sure your website remains accessible, effective, and highly ranked. Always remember to monitor the file regularly, making sure it aligns with your SEO goals and website structure.
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