Discover Why and How to Optimize Robots.txt File for SEO

Learn how to optimize your WordPress Robots.txt for SEO, which will help improve search engine visibility.

WordPress is a leading content management system (CMS), powering over 65% of websites. Its widespread use underscores the importance of optimizing WordPress sites, including the strategic management of the robots.txt file.

Many people know they should create a responsive site, add links to the content, and give real value to the readers to be in the good books of Google. But it is just as important to pay attention to the technical side of things. Therefore, WordPress robots.txt SEO optimization is crucial for SEO as it guides search engine bots on how to crawl and index a website.

Optimizing the robots.txt file can enhance a site’s visibility, directing bots away from non-essential pages, thereby improving crawl efficiency and site performance.

Let’s find out more about why and How to Optimize Your WordPress Robots.txt for SEO to make it do well on Google.

How to Optimize your WordPress Robots.txt for SEO

The robot.txt contains the essential information the crawlers need for accurate indexing. The file tells the crawlers which pages of a site to go to by allowing or disallowing URLs.

Managing the robots.txt file doesn’t have to be very difficult, especially if you use a Robots.txt generator. This tool is designed to help webmasters and SEO professionals create a robots.txt file easily and accurately.

Key Components for Optimization

When optimizing the robots.txt file, you need to keep the following in mind:

• Allow and Disallow Directives: Use Allow and Disallow directives to control access to specific URLs. For Googlebot, the Allow directive can override the Disallow directive if both are specified for the same URL.
• Crawl-Delay: Specify a crawl delay to prevent server overload by controlling how fast a bot can make requests to your site. However, not all search engines adhere to this directive.
• Sitemap Location: Including the location of your sitemap(s) in the robots.txt file helps search engines find and index your content more efficiently.
• Optimizing Crawl Budget: Prevent search engines from wasting crawl budget on unimportant or duplicate pages by disallowing them in the robots.txt file. This ensures that the crawl budget is spent on high-value pages.
• File Size and Placement: Ensure the robots.txt file is placed in the top-level directory of your website and is named robots.txt (case sensitive). Google has a maximum file size limit of 500KB for the robots.txt file.

Do You Need a Robot.txt File for your WordPress Site?

Yes. A robots.txt file is vital for all sites, including WordPress websites. On all sites, including a WordPress website, it’s the robot.txt file that determines where the crawlers go and what they can and cannot discover. Disallowing URLs such as the admin pages, plugin files, and themes folder helps manage server load without risking site performance.

Because search engines favor sites with robot.txt, WordPress automatically creates a robot.txt file for its new websites. But are there situations when you can go without a robot.txt file? Well, maybe – especially when you have a small website.

Adding a robot.txt file is the better option and is considered a good SEO practice, but a smaller WordPress website might do without an optimized robot.txt file. That said, even small WordPress sites with minimal content benefit from WordPress robots.txt SEO optimization. For instance, it can specify the location of the XML sitemap for more efficient discovery and indexing.

How to Create Robot.txt for SEO

It’s quick and easy to edit a robot.txt file using WPCode, a code snippets plugin. Its ease of use makes it valuable but unavailable on the free versions.

1. Install the WPCode plugin then -> File Editor -> robot.txt tab
2. Type or paste in the contents of the robot.txt file.
3. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page

Another way to access the robot.txt file for editing is to use the FTP client. It’s also useful if you need to create a robots.txt file.

1. Connect to the WordPress website using the FTP client.
2. Locate the robot.txt file in the website’s root folder. If the file isn’t in the folder, the site doesn’t have one. It will have to be created from scratch. Both Notepad and TextEdit are suitable since both use plain text.
3. Upload into the root folder
4. Save Changes

Alternatively, access the robot.txt file directly from the WordPress admin area via a WordPress SEO plugin. This way, it avoids the server files. The robot.txt file from the plugin’s tools section is available for editing. The section also has a root.txt generator. This tool tailors files to specific SEO needs. It is a useful tool for those unfamiliar with how to create a robots.txt file or those who are unable to keep up with the search engines and their changing algorithms.

Testing and Monitoring your Robot.txt File

Search Engines frequently update their algorithms, making monitoring and regular testing an essential part of managing a WordPress website. It’s a good practice that ensures the search engines continue to index the site’s content correctly, even after new pages are added. Updates in the algorithms can change how the search engine interprets the robot.txt file. This has implications for how they are honored and the site’s visibility.

Google Search Console introduced a robot.txt report feature after recently closing the robot.txt testing tool. It provides insights on hosting and how and when the site was last crawled, issues error warnings, and integrates relevant information from the Page Indexing report. This report, now accessed from the new Google Search Console, offers a comprehensive breakdown of how robot.txt is performing. Useful for testing, it also permits requests to recrawl the file. Bing offers a similar tool, robot.txt Tester, but there are several others, including Merkle and Screaming Frog.

Conclusion: Optimize Your WordPress Robots.txt for SEO

WordPress robots.txt SEO optimization serves as a pivotal component for enhancing a website’s visibility. The robots.txt file is more like a directive for Google bots, telling them about the pages to crawl and index. This strategic management of the robots.txt file is essential for optimizing crawl efficiency and site performance, ensuring that non-essential pages do not consume a valuable crawl budget and that important content is readily discoverable.

The good thing is that WordPress can automatically generate a robots.txt file for new sites, but webmasters must customize this file to align with their SEO and privacy requirements. Of course, you can do it manually, but remember that a better idea would be to rely on generator tools to access and optimize a robots.txt file.