Digital positioning became decisive and new marketing actions became necessary. All these new demands require preparation and new expertise, especially when it comes to understanding how digital platforms work.
Thus, techniques and strategies developed with the aim of placing the website on the first pages of Google have become essential for companies. In this context, having a correct website, with relevant information and functions that are really useful to users has become a key point in winning new customers.
But how can you ensure that a website is, in fact, in search results? Furthermore, how can we ensure that sensitive information, both from brands and customers, does not end up on search engine pages? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today, and many other features.
The robots.txt files. They aim to make it possible to control which pages and file contents crawlers can access, in addition to optimizing the indexing of the website’s pages.
Are you curious about the subject? In this article, we will explain everything about robots.txt. And how to use it on your website to ensure a safe experience for your users.
What is a robots.txt file?
The first step to understanding how to control everything that is indexed by search engines is to understand what a robots.txt file actually is.
Very succinctly, a robots.txt file is a programming code that is inserted into the root of the website and informs search platform robots what the indexing guidelines are, that is, which pages can appear in search results and which cannot.
But you may be wondering: what robots are these? Well, all search platforms have mechanisms dedicated to searching the entire internet in search of pages that should be indexed in their results.
In other words, when you go to a search engine and search for “digital marketing”, the platform offers you pages that contain this term and that have been indexed by it.
At Google, for example, we have Googlebot, also called “Spider” or just “Bot”. This robot searches for each new page that is published, analyzing its terms and directing it to the search results.
The robots.txt file aims to create criteria that direct these robots’ access to the website’s pages.
What are the purposes of a robots.txt file?
As already explained, the robots.txt file serves to guide robots that index pages in search engines what they should do in relation to the content.
Its most frequent application is to manage sensitive information that remains out of reach of platforms, such as customers’ personal data.
When completing an e-commerce purchase, for example, users must enter information on the website that is highly confidential, such as CPF and credit card number. With the robots.txt file you determine that pages containing this type of data are not displayed in search results.
However, it is not only to protect personal data that the robots.txt file is used. Pages with repeated content, which are quite common in paid traffic strategies, May also not be indexed.
There are several cases of pages that may not be interesting for search results, therefore, the use of robots.txt must always be aligned with the company’s SEO strategies and website security.
What are the benefits of implementing it on a website?
In addition to ensuring that sensitive information is not tracked by indexing robots, the robots.txt file is essential for making your website’s usability much better.
Googlebot’s guideline is to crawl the website’s pages without letting it affect the user experience. To do this, there must be a limit on the number of data searches carried out on a website. This is what we call the crawl rate.
When a site has too many pages, or a very slow response time during crawling, some pages may simply be left out of indexing.
To prevent this from happening, programmers use robots.txt files to hide pages that do not have information relevant to the site’s performance, giving priority to those whose content will be decisive for ranking.
How to create a robots.txt file?
Well, now that you know all the essential information about robots.txt, the next step is to understand how to apply this feature in practice.
As already mentioned at the beginning of the article, robots.txt is a programming code that is inserted into the root of the website, so that the extension of the resources itself tells us, it is a .txt file, that is, content in format of text.
Its commands act very similarly to other programming languages used for the web, such as HTML.
There are several commands in the robots.txt file. Let’s list the main ones here:
User-agent — the user-agent command is used to indicate which robot the rule will be applied to, that is, to select specific bots that must follow the commands that have been determined;
Disallow — the Disallow command determines which site files should not be indexed and, therefore, need to be excluded from search results;
Allow — acting in the opposite way, the Allow command informs indexing robots which files and pages should be crawled, allowing access to the correct directories;
Sitemap command — another function performed by robots.txt, and extremely useful, is the indication of the page’s sitemap, which helps to identify all pages contained on the site.
Ensuring that the website has a good ranking on the pages is a very complex job. SEO strategies, when not aligned with good website usability, may not be able to ensure access to content.
Having a website in the top positions on Google involves strategies and in-depth knowledge of content indexing mechanisms.
The robots.txt file is essential for ensuring that website content is crawled correctly, allowing customers to find exactly what brands can offer and preserving security for sensitive data.
