Do we need a robots.txt file?

Having a robots.txt file isn’t crucial for a lot of websites, especially small ones.

You can control which files crawlers may access on your site with a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file lives at the root of your site. So, for site www.example.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.example.com/robots.txt. robots.txt is a plain text file that follows the Robots Exclusion Standard. A robots.txt file consists of one or more rules. Each rule blocks or allows access for a given crawler to a specified file path on the domain or subdomain where the robots.txt file is hosted. Unless you specify otherwise in your robots.txt file, all files are implicitly allowed for crawling.

That said, there’s no good reason not to have one. It gives you more control over where search engines can and can’t go on your website, and that can help with things like:

• Preventing the crawling of duplicate content;
• Keeping sections of a website private (e.g., your staging site);
• Preventing the crawling of internal search results pages;
• Preventing server overload;
• Preventing Google from wasting “crawl budget.”
• Preventing images, videos, and resources files from appearing in Google search results.

Note that while Google doesn’t typically index web pages that are blocked in robots.txt, there’s no way to guarantee exclusion from search results using the robots.txt file.

If you are not sure or don’t have time, you can talk to us. Now Technology Systems offers immediate help and support to your website.