File robots.txt – the era of communication with robots is coming

Indexing bots are an essential element for anyone creating their own website. Why? Because it is thanks to them that search engines become aware of website content. Is it possible to avoid their attention or influence where they do not look?

Of course. The robots.txt file serves this purpose — it is a tool for communicating with the bots that index our website. It is a very simple text file that bots look for first when they visit a site. It is a kind of language understood by bots, consisting of command combinations compliant with the Robots Exclusion Protocol standard. By using this file, we have the ability to restrict access to resources that are unnecessary for a given search — such as images, styles, and specific subpages.

Which content should be blocked from indexing bots?

Modern websites have many subpages, some of which do not contain only textual content. These include familiar elements like shopping carts, internal search engines, or user panels. Due to their structure, these can cause many issues and should not be accessible to bots. It is important to pay close attention to the content we block, so that a single command does not prohibit bots from accessing the entire site. Private data should always be protected with a password.

How to create your own robot?

It is easy to find robots.txt file generators online, and CMS systems often support users in the creation process. First, we create a plain text file named robots.txt, which should be as simple as possible. To issue commands, we use keywords followed by a colon. This is how access rules are created. The most common keywords are:

User-agent: – the command’s recipient, i.e., the indexing bot. For Google’s bot, we additionally use an asterisk "*", for example: User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: – here we specify the address of the page or file that the bot should not scan, e.g., Disallow: /blocked/

Allow: – this is how we grant permission for content to be scanned

Remember that bots recognize case sensitivity. If your website is quite complex, it is worth adding comments explaining your decisions. The text file must be uploaded to the server and placed in the root directory of your website host. Additionally, you can test your file using the Search Console tool. This tool allows you to check whether specific elements of your site are visible to indexing bots.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that the robots.txt file is a set of recommendations that bots should, but are not required to, follow. If you want to completely block access to certain data, it is advisable to also use a strong, hard-to-break password.