Every Web-site should have a robots.txt sitemap, although it is a small object indeed. It gives directives to the crawler of the search engine in order to know through which part of your site it should crawl or index thus affecting your sites ranking in search engine. Below are ten reasons why you need a robots.txt file for your website.
1. control which Part of Your Site the Search Engines Should Visit.
Using robots.txt file, you have some level of discretion on which parts of your website the search engine is allowed to crawl. It is especially helpful when a site contains substantial numbers of pages which should not be normally indexed like the pages that include duplicate content or admin sections. This you do by blocking those particular pages so as to allow the search engine to concentrate on more relevant content in your site.
2. Improve Crawl Efficiency.
Currently, search engine has a crawl budget in each site implying that there is limit to the number of page they can crawl at a given time. Some benefits of blocking irrelevant or low-priority pages by using robots.txt are that search engine crawlers spend more time on other Priority pages than they used to and that may increase crawl efficiency and SEO.
3. Prevent problems associated with duplicate content submissions.
That is why the presence of duplicative content in the site has an adverse effect on the site’s rank. If different versions of content are indexed in the Search Engine, it ends up confusing the search engine, and weakens your strategy. One of the ways in which a robots.txt file can be useful is that it avoids these problems and keeps a purged index: duplicate/versions, such as print-friendly versions of the pages, are blocked.
4. Keep sensitive information safe.
Your website may be having some parts like login page, staging page or test page which you do not wish to be indexed. Using robots.txt you can disallow search engine crawlers from visiting and indexing these areas so that they remain unseen and your privacy is safe.
5. Control Third-Party Crawlers
Robots.txt is used not only by search engine bots but also by any other third party crawlers. You get to decide which crawlers are allowed in your site and which ones are not, thus saving on server use and shielding your data from overburdening from unnecessary third-party bots.
6. Direct Search Engines to Important Sitemaps
Robots.txt can be used to point search engines to your sitemap, which in turn provided easy understanding of your site structure. Having sitemap in robots.txt offers and indexing path to the se’s to help it crawl your site better
7. Simplify Maintenance and Updates
It creates simplicity in terms of deciding on which page should be crawled or which one shouldn’t sometimes without having to change each of the Webpages. This centralised approach makes site maintenance easier because there are hardly any changes that cannot be managed swiftly to your crawl directives based on the changes in the growth of your site or in your SEO plans.
Conclusion
Every site needs to have a robots.txt file to control access to your site is critical for site management and for SEO. Effective utility for limiting the access of crawlers, increasing the effectiveness of crawling a site, avoiding the generation of duplicates for content, and preserving sensitive information. The robots.txt helps you achieve significant results in improving your website’s work and enhancing SEO characteristics.
