What is a Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is a text file that contains instructions that indicate which pages on your website search engine crawlers should and should not visit.These instructions are specified by "allowing" or "prohibiting" the behavior of specific crawlers.
How does the Robots.txt file work?
The Robots.txt file tells search engine robots which URLs they can grab and, more importantly, which URLs they can ignore.
Search engines have two main purposes:
- Crawl the web to discover content
- Index and provide content to searchers looking for information
When search engine robots crawl web pages, they discover and track links. This process takes them from Site A to Site B to Site C, spanning millions of links, pages, and websites.
However, if the robot finds the robots.txt file, it will read the file before performing other operations.
The grammar is simple.
Assign rules by identifying user agents (search engine robots) and instructions (rules).
You can also use the asterisk (*) wildcard to assign instructions to each user agent, which applies the rule to all robots.