Robots.txt Generator

Robots.txt File Generator - Generate robots.txt Instantly.

Do you want to allow all web crawlers to access your website or block some web crawlers from accessing it? If yes, use our Google Robots.txt File Generator to generate your custom robots.txt file online in seconds.

How to create a robots.txt online with a Google robots.txt file generator?

Making the robots.txt file is time-consuming, and a tiny mistake can give devastating results. Therefore, using some reliable online tool to generate the robots.txt file per your requirement is better.

To create a robots.txt file online with a Google robots.txt file generator, perform the following steps.

• Open the robots.txt generator.
• Here you will find several options. It depends on which option you want to use. However, only some of the options are mandatory.
• The first row contains default values for all robots and a crawl delay.
• The second row is for an XML sitemap URL. Mention it if you have. Otherwise, please leave it blank.
• The next couple of rows contains search engine bots' name. Suppose you want a specific search engine bot (Google) to crawl your website. Then select "Allowed" from the dropdown for Google bot or vice versa.
• The last row is for restricted directories.

Note: Ensure to add the forward slash before filling the field with the address of the directory or page.

What is a Robots.txt file?

Do you want to increase your's website SEO ranking? If yes, then it's easy to do so. You can do it naturally with the help of a tiny file called robots.txt.

A robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a file that contains the following instructions.

• How to crawl a website.
• Which crawlers are allowed or blocked from accessing a website?
• How to access and index the website's content.
• How to serve that content to the users.

Characteristics of a robots.txt file

• It's a text (.txt) file.
• Always in the root folder.
• Always named "robots.txt," you cannot use capital "R."
• The URL must be https://abcdomain.com/robots.txt.
• Search bots are not bound to follow it.

Robots.txt syntax

The basic syntax of the robots.txt file is

User-agent: [user-agent name]

Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]

Creating a robots.txt file from the syntax looks easy. But a tiny mistake can bring devastating results if your main pages are not indexed.

Therefore, before generating the robots.txt file as a web admin or SEO expert, you must know the following terms used in the robots.txt file.

User-agent refers to specific web crawlers for whom you want to give instructions. For example, in the case of Google's spider, called Google bot, you can use

User-Agent: Googlebot

Disallow instructs the web crawler not to index the particular URL. Only one disallow line is allowed for each URL. For example,

Disallow: /myfile1.html

Disallow: /myfile2.html

Allow instructs the web crawler to index the particular URL. Even if the main folder is disallowed for the Google bot, you can enable the subfolder to get indexed using the allow command.

Crawl-delay refers to the millisecond time crawlers should wait before loading and crawling page content. For example,

Crawl-delay: 10

However, each search engine bot interprets it in its way.

In Bing and Yahoo, the above crawl-delay means a time window means it will divide a day into 10 seconds windows, and within each window, it will crawl a maximum of one page.

In Yandex, it's a time between successive visits. However, you can also set the crawl-delay for the Google bot, but it does not acknowledge that command.

XML Sitemap calls the sitemap(s) associated with the URL. Top search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing support that functionality.

Sum up

To sum up, the robots.txt file is a standard adopted by web admins to instruct the crawlers/bots.

• Which part of their website needs indexing?
• Which part of their website does not need indexing? That includes the website's login page, dashboard, duplicate content, and the pages under development.

Note: Crawlers/bots like malware detectors and email harvesters do not follow this standard and try to scan the weakness in your website. After detecting that weakness, there is a considerable probability that they may start indexing those parts that you do not want to get indexed.

SEO and robots.txt

Do you want to rank higher in Google and other search engine results? The answer is simple "Yes," as everyone wants. Then focus on the robots.txt file. I am not saying it's a single factor that can rank you higher. But there is no doubt that it contributes to getting a better SEO rank.

When the search engine crawlers/bots crawl your website, they first go after a robots.txt file in the domain root. If it's not found, there may be a massive chance that they will not correctly crawl your website or not crawl all the pages you need to crawl.

Crawl budget and robots.txt

Google runs on a crawl budget, and that budget is based on a crawl limit. The crawl limit is the time the Google crawlers spend on your website. But if Google feels that crawling your website results in shaking user experience, it will slowly crawl your website. Slow crawling means that Google bots will only give importance to your website's primary or essential pages. All the new pages you want to be indexed will take the time or be ignored by the Google crawlers.

Thus to overcome that issue, each website must have a sitemap and robots.txt file to tell the Google and other search engine crawlers which part of their website needs more attention.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How to check if a website has a robots.txt file?

Type in a domain name, then adds "/robots.txt" to the end of the URL. For example, for the domain "abcdomain.com," the URL must be https://abcdomain.com/robots.txt.

Can we use robots.txt to prevent sensitive data from appearing in SERP results?

Do not use robots.txt in that case. Because other pages may directly link to the page containing sensitive information, thus bypassing the robots.txt directives. And it may get indexed. Therefore, use some different approaches. The better one is to use the noindex meta tag.

What is the difference between a robots.txt file and a sitemap?

Robots.txt file tells the search engine which web pages of your website need to crawl and which do not. The XML sitemap contains all your website URLs or web pages. The sitemap indicates all the web pages on your website that you want search engines to get crawl.