Want to take control of how search engines crawl your site? With ‘robots.txt disallow,’ you’re in charge of what stays private.
As VP of SEO, Jen Cornwell, emphasizes, mastering this file is key to ensuring your site gets indexed just the way you want it.
If you’re new to this or need a refresher, let’s break down how using ‘robots.txt disallow’ can help streamline your site’s visibility!
What We’ll Cover:
- What Is A Robots.txt File?
- Examples of How to Block URLs in Robots.txt
- Handling Resource Files and Crawl Budget Optimization
- Getting Started With Robots.txt
- How to Test Your Results
- Modern SEO Practices: Crawl Budget Management
- Robots.txt + JavaScript & SPAs: Let’s Get Technical
- Robots.txt for Different Search Engines
- Avoiding Robots.txt Mistakes Like a Pro
- Robots.txt FAQs
Expert Opinion on Robots.txt Strategies
Robots.txt files are essential in regulating search engine crawlers’ interaction with content on any web page, ultimately contributing to your search engine optimization efforts. While Google and other crawl bots need to be able to crawl certain pages, not all content will be relevant or something you want these bots to see and index, in which case you’d want to implement a solid robots.txt strategy.
For instance, some pages might contain sensitive or private information you don’t want to index, or entire segments of the website are irrelevant to organic search campaigns.
In any case, knowing how to utilize your robots.txt is helpful in ensuring search engine crawlers only see the content you want them to see.
What is a Robots.txt File?
Robots.txt, also known as the Robot Exclusion, is key in preventing search engine robots from crawling restricted areas of your site.
How Robots.txt Works
Robots.txt is a text file that webmasters create to teach robots how to crawl website pages and lets crawlers know whether to access a file or not. This element can effectively manage crawler traffic, indicating what to crawl and what to ignore.
Purpose of Robots.txt
While it does have the ability to lower your ranking on a SERP, its most important function is to avoid overloading your site with requests. Most people use a robots.txt file to tell search engine crawlers to avoid unimportant information so that it focuses more on important and up-to-date information on a site.
How Crawlers Interact with Robots.txt
When crawlers visit your site, the first thing they look for is a robots.txt file. This file tells the crawler which content to crawl and index and which content should be avoided. Basically, it works by blocking the crawlers from certain content and redirecting it elsewhere.
Blocking URLs with Robots.txt
You may want to block urls in robots.txt to keep Google from indexing private photos, expired special offers or other pages that you’re not ready for users to access. Using it to block a URL can help with SEO efforts.
Managing Duplicate Content
It can solve issues with duplicate content (however there may be better ways to do this, which we will discuss later). When a robot begins crawling, they first check to see if a robots.txt file is in place that would prevent them from viewing certain pages.
Google’s Directives for Robots.txt
Keep in mind that Google bots only acknowledge certain directives for a robots.txt disallow. As of late 2024, Google ignores certain directives like “crawl-delay” and “nofollow,” but you can still use the directives “disallow,” “allow,” “sitemap,” and others that Google designates at this time.
Risks of Incorrect Robots.txt Implementation
When using a robots.txt file, be careful! If you install a robots.txt file incorrectly, you could inadvertently tell search engines to disallow all of your contentt. If this happens, your site will be removed from search engine results pages, having a negative effect on your traffic, conversions, and overall revenue.
Last but not least, try not to use robots txt disallow CSS or JavaScript files. Doing so could keep bots from properly crawling and understanding content, subsequently hurting your SEO.
Limitations of Robots.txt
It’s also worth noting that not all crawlers will obey your command. While Googlebot and other top-name crawlers almost always will, other, lesser-known crawlers may not. If there is something on your site that you absolutely do not want to be exposed to, it’s better to put it behind a password-protected file or paywall rather than a robots.txt file.
Examples of How to Block URLs in Robots.txt
Here are a few examples of how to block URLs in robots.txt:
Block All The Irrelevant Stuff
If you want to block search engine robots from crawling parts of your website, block all the irrelevant stuff—think /admin/, /login/, or /private/. Keep your main content wide open for crawlers. You can add the following line in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Block a Specific URL
If you want to block a specific page or directory, you can do so by adding this line in your robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private.html
If you want to block several URLs:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private.html
Disallow: /special-offers.html
Disallow: /expired-offers.html
Block a Specific File Type
If you want to block a specific file type from being indexed, you can add this line to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *Disallow: /*.html
Using a Canonical Tag
If you want to prevent search engine robots from indexing duplicate content, you can add the following canonical tag to the duplicate page.
rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/original-url”
Keeping Important Resources Crawlable
Now, you don’t want to disallow all resource files with robots.txt, just the ones you don’t need. As such, you must be very specific about the blocked internal resources in robots.txt, taking care not to block critical elements that hinder functionality, like JavaScript, CSS, and image files.
Use robots.txt disallow directory blocks for specific paths with non-essential content, and exclude critical elements in the process.
Handling Resource Files and Crawl Budget Optimization
As mentioned, you need to ensure search engine bots can access the files on your website that maintain functionality. If you disallow all resource files with robots.txt, crawlers won’t be able to understand your website’s content and what it’s all about, including:
- Images with Schema markup that complement text content
- JavaScript or CSS language that might include other structured data
In the process of implementing robots.txt disallow, you’ll want to optimize the crawl budget, which refers to the number of pages search engine bots can crawl on a website over a particular period.
As such, make sure crawlers can comb your most critical pages while blocking ones that might waste the crawl budget, allowing for faster and better indexing.
Getting Started With Robots.txt
Before you start putting together the file, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t already have one in place. To find it, just add “/robots.txt” to the end of any domain name—www.examplesite.com/robots.txt. If you have one, you’ll see a file that contains a list of instructions. Otherwise, you’ll see a blank page.
Next, Check if Any Important Files Are Being Blocked
Head over to your Google Search Console to see whether your file is blocking any important files. The robots.txt Tester will reveal whether your file is preventing Google’s crawlers from reaching certain parts of your website.
It’s also worth noting that you might not need a robots.txt file at all. If you have a relatively simple website and don’t need to block off specific pages for testing or to protect sensitive information, you’re fine without one. And—the tutorial stops here.
Setting Up Your Robots.Txt File
These files can be used in a variety of ways. However, their main benefit is that marketers can allow or disallow several pages at a time without having to access the code of each page manually.
All robots.txt files will result in one of the following outcomes:
- Full allow—all content can be crawled
- Full disallow—no content can be crawled. This means that you’re fully blocking Google’s crawlers from reaching any part of your website.
- Conditional allow—The rules outlined in the file determine which content is open for crawling and which is blocked. If you’re wondering how to disallow a url without blocking crawlers off from the whole site, this is it.
If you would like to set up a file, the process is actually quite simple and involves two elements:
- The “user-agent,” which is the robot the following URL block applies to
- “Disallow,” which is the URL you want to block.
These two lines are seen as one single entry in the file, meaning that you can have several entries in one file.
Formatting Your Robots.Txt File
Once you’ve determined which URLs you want to include in your robots.txt file, you’ll need to format it correctly.
When setting up your file, you should add the following components:
User-Agent
This is the robot that you want the following rules to apply to. It’s often written in the following format:
User-agent: [robot name]
The most common robots you’ll find here are Googlebot and Bingbot
Disallow
This is the part of the file where you’ll specify which URLs should be blocked. The syntax for this usually looks like:
Disallow: [URL or directory]
So, if you want to block the directory “/privacy-policy/”, you’ll want to add “/privacy-policy/” as your disallow entry.
You can also use wildcards in your robots.txt file, letting you block multiple URLs in one go.
Sitemap
The sitemap element is optional. However, search engines may take it as a sign that you’re trying to make sure your site is easily navigable and trustworthy. This can help your ranking in the SERPs.
Your sitemap entry should look something like this:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Once you have your file set up, all you have to do is save it as “robots.txt,” upload it to the root domain, and you’re done.
Your file will now be visible at https://[yoursite.com]/robots.txt.
Location
You should always place the robots.txt file in the root domain of your website.
Note that the address is case-sensitive, so you should not use capital letters. It should always start with an “/.”
How to Block URLs in Robots.txt
For the user-agent line, you can list a specific bot (such as Googlebot) or can apply the URL txt block to all bots by using an asterisk. The following is an example of a user-agent blocking all bots.
User-agent: *
The second line in the entry, disallow, lists the specific pages you want to block. To block the entire site, use a forward slash. For all other entries, use a forward slash first and then list the page, directory, image, or file type
Disallow: / blocks the entire site.
Disallow: /bad-directory/ blocks both the directory and all of its contents.
Disallow: /secret.html blocks a page.
After making your user-agent and disallow selections, one of your entries may look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /bad-directory/
View other example entries from Google Search Console.
How to Save Your File
- Save your file by copying it into a text file or notepad and saving as “robots.txt”.
- Be sure to save the file to the highest-level directory of your site and ensure that it is in the root domain with a name exactly matching “robots.txt”.
- Add your file to the top-level directory of your website’s code for simple crawling and indexing.
- Make sure that your code follows the correct structure: User-agent → Disallow → Allow → Host → Sitemap. This allows search engines to access pages in the correct order.
- Make all URLs you want to “Allow:” or “Disallow:” are placed on their own line. If several URLs appear on a single line, crawlers will have difficulties separating them and you may run into trouble.
- Always use lowercase it to save your file, as file names are case-sensitive and don’t include special characters.
- Create separate files for different subdomains. For example, “example.com” and “blog.example.com” each have individual files with their own set of directives.
- If you must leave comments, start a new line and preface the comment with the # character. The # lets crawlers know not to include that information in their directive.
Where Should I Upload My Robots.txt File?
Once you’ve downloaded and edited your Robots.txt file, it’s time to upload it to the root of your domain. Uploading your file depends on your platform or hosting site.
Some services, such as Blogger or Wix, won’t let you access the file directly. If this is the case, explore your platform’s settings to see what options are available to you.
If you can edit your robots.txt file directly, you’ll want to save it with UTF-8 encoding after you’re finished editing.
Now it’s time to upload your robots.txt file to the root of your domain. Since this part is so dependent on your domain hosting site, there is no one correct way to do this. Check with your hosting provider to see your next steps.
How to Test Your Results
Test your results in your Google Search Console account to make sure that the bots are crawling the parts of the site you want and blocking the URLs you don’t want searchers to see.
- First, open the tester tool and take a look over your file to scan for any warnings or errors.
- Then, enter the URL of a page on your website into the box found at the bottom of the page.
- Then, select the user-agent you’d like to simulate from the dropdown menu.
- Click TEST.
- The TEST button should read either ACCEPTED or BLOCKED, which will indicate whether the file is blocked by crawlers or not.
- Edit the file, if needed, and test again.
- Remember, any changes you make inside GSC’s tester tool will not be saved to your website (it’s a simulation).
- If you’d like to save your changes, copy the new code to your website.
Keep in mind that this will only test the Googlebot and other Google-related user-agents. That said, using the tester is huge when it comes to SEO. See, if you do decide to use the file, it’s imperative that you set it up correctly. If there are any errors in your code, the Googlebot might not index your page—or you might inadvertently block important pages from the SERPs.
Using Other Tools for Testing Robots.txt Disallow
In addition to Google Search Console, you can use many other tools to test your disallow and determine whether you’ve blocked internal resources in robots.txt the right way.
For example, you can use Screaming Frog and Ryte to do so, along with manual methods.
Using these tools, you can also manually check the results of robots.txt disallow by taking the following steps:
- Open a private browser window
- Directly access your robots.txt file in the URL bar (e.g. domain.com/robots.txt)
- If the file content shows up, you can paste specific URLs to test within Google Search Console or other tools and see which are “blocked” in accordance with the rules you have set.
Just be sure to keep robots.txt consistently updated to optimize SEO for long-term success, which will help you get and stay ahead of competitors without compromising indexing.
Modern SEO Practices: Crawl Budget Management
Alright, SEO pros, let’s talk crawl budget! Think of it like your website’s VIP list—only the most important pages should get crawled. For big sites with tons of pages, you’ve got to make sure the search engine’s crawlers are hanging out in the right places. That’s where robots.txt comes in handy!
Why Crawl Budget Management Matters
With Crawl Budget Management, you don’t waste crawls on low-priority stuff: You wouldn’t want search engines spending time on your login pages, search results, or those random filtered product pages, right?
Spotlight on the VIPs: Use robots.txt to make sure your best content—like your product pages, blogs, and services—gets the attention it deserves.
Cut the clutter: Don’t let crawlers get lost in endless product filters or duplicate content (looking at you, printer-friendly pages).
Best Practice Tip: Use Google Search Console to monitor crawl activity and identify sections where crawl budget could be better utilized.
Robots.txt + JavaScript & SPAs: Let’s Get Technical
Don’t block JavaScript files: Search engines (especially Google) now need to see your JS files to understand and render your page. If you block them, you’re basically sending them blindfolded into your site.
Watch those dynamic URLs: For SPAs, robots.txt can help control which URLs and API endpoints are being crawled. But be careful not to block anything that’s crucial for rendering your content!
Pro Tip: Always test how Google sees your site using the Fetch as Google tool to avoid crawling issues.
Robots.txt for Different Search Engines:
1. Bing
Similar to Google, but Bingbot loves a good sitemap. Be sure to include your sitemap link in robots.txt to help Bing find your pages faster.
While Google doesn’t support “crawl-delay” and certain other directives, Bing does via its crawler, Bingbot.
2. Yahoo
Slurp (Yahoo’s crawler) is basically retired. Yahoo now uses Bing for most search results, so no need to stress too much. But if you’ve got old Yahoo-specific directives, update those ASAP.
Because of its use of Bing, Yahoo also supports some of the directives that Googlebot doesn’t, including “crawl-delay.”
3. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckBot is all about privacy. It respects your robots.txt rules, but unlike other search engines, it doesn’t track users. Make sure your site is privacy-first if you’re targeting DuckDuckGo users!
Pro Tip: If you’re optimizing for search engines beyond Google, make sure your robots.txt file is up to date for all the big players, not just one.
If you’re not sure how a particular search engine will respond to your robots.txt disallow, consider running a test using multiple search engine tools to gauge results. Depending on how each search engine interprets directives, you can figure out how to optimize for the engines your audience uses.
Avoiding Robots.txt Mistakes Like a Pro
We’ve all been there—robots.txt mistakes can mess up your SEO real fast. One wrong line, and you might accidentally block the entire internet from seeing your pages (yikes!). Here’s how to avoid the most common pitfalls.
Common Robots.txt Mistakes Include:
1. Blocking essential resources: If you accidentally block CSS or JavaScript files, crawlers can’t render your page properly. It’s like trying to read a book with half the pages missing.
2. Over-blocking: Be careful not to block entire sections of your site. For example, don’t disallow /category/ if that’s where your money pages live.
3. Bad syntax: One typo, and your robots.txt file can go rogue. Make sure to double-check every line!
4. Failing to update regularly: Frequent updates to your robots.txt file will help you avoid compromising your SEO and crawl budget, maintaining proper indexing and ranking. Conduct regular audits to gauge how search engines are interpreting your robots.txt disallow and optimize accordingly.
Pro Tip: Use Google’s robots.txt Tester to preview how your site will be crawled and to catch any errors before they wreck your SEO.
Robots.txt FAQs
1. Where should I save my robots.txt?
Your robots.txt should be saved in the root domain of your website. The address should be lowercase and start with an “/.” For example, the file can be found at https://www.example.com/robots.txt but not at https://www.example.com/ROBOTS.TXT.
2. Should I always use wildcards in my disallow lines?
Using wild cards won’t be always necessary, and can actually cause problems if you’re not careful. When listing specific URLs, you should always list them completely—even if you think a wildcard might work.
3. Can I use robots.txt to block bots from a specific image?
Yes, you can. To block a specific image, you can use the “Disallow” command and specify the file type of the image (e.g., “Disallow: /*.png”).
4. Does my robots.txt need to be perfect for it to work?
While it’s essential to ensure your robots.txt is accurate, minor errors shouldn’t keep your file from working. You can use the tester tool in Google Search Console to test your file.
5. What if I want to block specific bots?
You can use the “User-agent” line to specify which bots to block. For example, if you want to block all bots except for Googlebot, you can use this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
6. What does disallow mean in a robot.txt?
Adding “disallow” to your robots.txt file will tell Google and other search engine crawlers that they are not allowed to access certain pages, files, or sections of your website, directing them to avoid that content. This will usually also result in your page not appearing on search engine results pages.
7. What does user agent * disallow mean?
Adding “user agent *” gives you the opportunity to disallow only some crawlers. For example, if you want Googlebot to still crawl your page but you don’t want Facebot (Facebook’s crawler) to do it, you would type “user-agent: Facebot”. This will block Facebot but still allow all other crawlers to index your page. If you want to block everyone, you would type “user-agent: *”. The star will block every crawler.
8. How can you block AI crawlers?
You might want to know how to disallow specific pages with Google robots.txt from AI crawlers, which is doable with the right steps.
You can do so by adding the AI crawler’s “user-agent” name to the disallow directive within your file. Each AI crawler has its own designated user agent to block.
9. What alternatives can I use to robots txt disallow?
Generally, robots.txt is helpful in blocking access to large portions of your site, including test directories and admin dashboards, but you may want to use other methods to block certain pages when necessary.
For example, you can use meta robots tags to prevent the indexing of duplicate content or specific pages like logins and checkout pages. These robots tags also work to handle dynamic content like product pages and blog posts.
Password protection could also help block indexing when other search engine crawlers might ignore robots.txt disallow entirely, as this security measure keeps certain pages and files private on your server.
Fully Implement Robots.txt Disallow with Ignite Visibility
If you want to learn how to disallow all except for robots.txt on certain domains or pages, Ignite Visibility can assist with this and many other aspects of SEO. Our experts will be able to ensure only the pages and resources you want to index and rank will contribute to your strategy, helping you optimize your crawl budget and stay on top of the competition.
Specifically, with our help, you’ll be able to:
- Properly implement robots.txt disallow
- Avoid any errors that might appear with optimization
- Build a fully functioning and optimized website that dominates search results
- Supplement disallows with other SEO efforts in a comprehensive campaign
- And more!
Want to see what we can do for your rankings on Google and other search engines? Reach out to us today, and we’ll connect you with a member of our team to discuss your digital marketing needs.
