If you need to make sure bots won’t crawl some of your content, it’s better to protect it with a password. That’s why you shouldn’t use robots.txt as a way of protecting sensitive data on your website from being crawled. Malicious bots may ignore the instructions and access the pages anyway. However, search engines are not the only ones that use crawlers. Most crawlers, especially those used by search engines, won’t crawl any pages blocked by robots.txt. Robots.txt is only a guideline, not an obligatory rule. You can’t force robots to obey the rules in robots.txt Learn how to overcome this issue by reading our article on how to fix the “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” status. For example, they can find links leading to the page from other sites, use the anchor text and show it on the search results page. They might still do it if they find information about the content in other sources and decide it’s an important one. A page that’s blocked from crawling might still get indexedĭisallowing crawling in a robots.txt file does not guarantee that search engines won’t index the page. If a search engine can’t crawl the page, then that page can’t be indexed, and consequently, it won’t appear on search result pages. However, if a valid robots.txt file exists, crawlers look inside it for the directives and proceed to crawl the website accordingly. If no robots.txt file exists, crawlers proceed to crawl the website freely.Before crawling a website, crawlers first look for a robots.txt file in the website’s root directory.Crawlers have a queue of URLs containing both new and previously known websites they want to crawl.This process can be divided into a few steps: They have various uses, but search engines use them to find web content to index. So, for example, if your website is called, the robots.txt file should live at /robots.txt.īut how does the file work? How do bots discover it?Ĭrawlers are programs that crawl the web. The file should be located at the root directory of your website. It contains rules for crawlers, defining which pages should or shouldn’t be crawled. Robots.txt is a simple text file that you can place on your server to control how bots access your pages. A page that’s blocked from crawling might still get indexed
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