Robots.txt Best Practices According to Google Experts

Google experts recommend several best practices for robots.txt to ensure effective crawling control and SEO benefits:

• Keep rules simple and precise: Use clear, straightforward directives to avoid confusing crawlers and unintended blocking.

• Use one directive per line: Each Allow or Disallow rule should be on its own line to ensure proper interpretation by search engines.

• Utilize wildcards and special characters: Use * to match multiple characters and $ to specify the end of a URL, simplifying rules for blocking groups of URLs or specific patterns.

• Specify user-agents explicitly: Begin each group of rules with a User-agent line to target specific crawlers. Use * to apply rules to all crawlers except some special ones like AdsBot, which require explicit naming.

• Test your robots.txt regularly: Use tools like Google Search Console’s Robots.txt Tester or open-source testers to simulate how Googlebot reads your file and to catch syntax errors or unintended blocks.

• Avoid unsupported directives: Google only supports User-agent, Allow, Disallow, and Sitemap fields. Directives like crawl-delay are ignored by Googlebot and should not be relied upon.

• Use comments carefully: Comments start with # and are ignored by crawlers, but placing them incorrectly can cause misinterpretation. Keep comments separate from directives.

• Be mindful of case sensitivity: Rules are case-sensitive, so Disallow: /file.asp will not block /FILE.asp.

• Combine robots.txt with other methods: For finer control, use robots meta tags or HTTP headers alongside robots.txt to manage indexing and crawling more precisely.

Following these practices helps boost SEO by guiding crawlers to valuable content, protect sensitive data, and reduce unnecessary server load from bots.