You don’t have to rely only on your content to get search engines to find and crawl your website. You can implement robot text files and indexes to help the bots find you and your SEO content faster. The code tells each crawler what to do or what not to do.

A robot text file is just a code that you add to the code on your website to tell the robots that crawl your website what to do. It controls the spiders and what they see or interact with on your website. You can tell them to search a file or not search a file. While you don’t have to have a robot.txt file, you do need to ensure that if you have one that you’re using it right.

Web pages – Use a robot.txt file to tell the spider whether to crawl a specific file or not to search a specific file.

Image Files – You can prevent image files from showing up in a Google search which is a good thing if you don’t want people stealing your images.

Resource Files – If you have files that aren’t important for the search engines to know you can use a robot.txt file to block the bots from crawling it. Be careful though because you want to ensure that the site shows up as mobile friendly.

To edit your robots.txt files you can use software or you can do it manually if you know how to code. All you need to do is find out where the file is using FTP or another file manager in CPanel. But, it is a lot simpler to use software and tools to help you.

Do You Need a Robot.txt File?

If your site is very simple, and you want everything indexed, don’t want to hide any files from the search engines, you may not need a robot.txt file. But, it’s likely you have one already if you are using WordPress. Thankfully, there are plugins that you can use to work with this file easily.

SEO Rank Analyser – This plugin will help you with much of your SEO but especially robot.txt files.

WP Meta SEO – You can use this for all your SEO purposes, but it also helps you make sure your robot.txt files are working properly.

Robots.txt Generator – You can use this page to generate a robots.txt file easily. Be sure to check to see if you already have one before adding another.

Many SEO focused plugins like Yoast SEO usually offer the ability to edit, add, or change your Robots.txt files too. Check if you already have an SEO plugin before you add another one. Having just one way is better than adding more plugins that you don’t need.