When exploring how you can optimize your site for SEO purposes, you would stumble across a file called Robots.txt on a WordPress site. It’s imperative to make sure that your website would rank at the top on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) because having the Robots.txt feature could make it easy for search engine ‘bots’ to search the most significant pages.
Almost all of the websites have a Robots.txt file; however, that doesn’t mean that most web developers comprehend the capabilities of the file. The Robots.txt file is a means of communicating with a search engine to know where it should and shouldn’t go on your website, and all leading search engines support all of the file’s features and functionality.
What Is A WordPress Robots.txt File?
Before anything else, it’s essential to understand what a ‘robot’ is and how it relates to a WordPress website. There is numerous information in this regard that found on robots.net; furthermore, the bots are automated systems that are in charge of visiting millions of websites and rank them for the search engine to show in its results.
However, there is a problem; modern websites consist of not just pages but numerous elements. What a robots.txt file do is give search engine bots instruction on where to look specifically, and the file is simple to construct to be as detailed as you like, even though you’re not highly skilled when it comes to being technical.
How Does A Robots.txt File Help Your Website?
If your main objective is to stop particular web pages from being included in the results of a search engine, robots.txt is not all that reliable when it comes to controlling the index of web page searches. It’s because the file is not involved with telling search engines to organize all of the content, only to ‘crawl’ the contents of your site.
Where Is The Robots.txt File Located On WordPress?
After you have constructed a WordPress site, the website creator generates a virtual robots.txt file automatically on the main folder of your server. For instance, if the location of the website you created is at ‘yourwebsite.com,’ then you should be able to access a link such as ‘yourwebsite.com/robots.txt’ to locate the file.
Once you have access to it, you would encounter a basic form of the robots.txt file; however, the default file that WordPress makes for you isn’t all that accessible at all. Although the default file works, you would want to create your file if you’re going to make changes to it, and there are numerous ways to construct a new robots.txt file in a single minute.
How Do You Create A Robots.txt File For WordPress Sites?
When all is said and done on how you would construct your robots.txt file, you’re now ready to make one. Although you can do minor edits of the file on WordPress by doing it manually or with the use of a plugin, however, three well-known methods can get the work done in creating and uploading the file on your own is available for everyone.
Using Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most famous WordPress plugin when it comes to search engine optimization as it allows the user to develop their web pages to enhance the use of keywords. Apart from that, it also helps you when it comes to expanding the readability of the content; in other words, more visitors to the site will probably enjoy the website more.
With The Use Of An All-In-One SEO Pack Plugin
All-in-one SEO Pack is also one of the most famous names when it comes to search engine optimizations for WordPress. Although this plugin contains most of the benefits and features of Yoast SEO, there are web developers who would prefer the All-in-one SEO pack due to the plugin being lightweight
Construct And Upload Your Own Robots.txt File Via File Transfer Protocol
A straightforward way of creating a robots.txt file is to open your most preferred text editor, such as TextEdit or Notepad, and type in a few lines as it takes only a few seconds to do this. Then you can save the file using the name you desire and the type of the text file. When you have finished the file, you can now connect it to your website using the file transfer protocol.
What’s left is to upload the robots.txt file to your website’s server from your computer, and you can accomplish that by right-clicking on the robots.txt file and merely moving and dropping it into the corresponding location of your website’s server.
How To Test Your Robots.txt File And Send It To Google Search Console
After you have accomplished making and uploading the robots.txt file in your server, you can now assess it for failures and miscalculations with the use of the Google Search Console. The Google Search Console is a compilation of tools that helps you oversee the content you’ve made and how it shows up in the search results.
For your website to expand its exposure, you will need to make sure that the search engine bots are pursuing the website’s most relevant information. With all the available methods in configuring a robots.txt file, WordPress will allow you to configure specifically on how the bots would communicate with your site to present searcher’s more consistent content.
Common Mistakes In The Robots.txt File
In creating a robots.txt file for your website, there are a few common mistakes that most web developers do. One of the errors is using the wrong order of commands as the sequence of logical instructions should be clear and understandable. And also, if to put multiple ‘Allow’ and ‘Disallow’ commands in the file, then you should type each one from a new line.
Other developers wonder why their file is not working, and it’s all because they didn’t check the proper name for the file as it should always be “robots.txt.” Another mistake involves the code input of the robots.txt file that you should put an asterisk if you want to establish instructions for all the bots, the rest of the problems are unchecked syntax errors.
Takeaway
For the people who are accountable for taking care of one or countless websites, the advantages of a well-built robots.txt file all come down to two divisions. One is optimizing a search engine’s crawl by instructing the bots to not waste efforts on web pages that you don’t want to be cataloged.
The second advantage of using a well-built robots.txt file is for the search engine bots to optimize its research usage by obstructing the bots that are wastefully consuming all of the resources of your servers. However, using a robots.txt file is not a sure-fire way of controlling what web pages the search engine will arrange.
The robots.txt file in WordPress is a compelling tool to increase the exposure of the website to bots from search engines. Although it is essential to have a robots.txt file for every website, it’s not very hard to create as there are numerous ways in constructing a robots.txt file.