How To Use Robots

Your Robots.txt file is what tells search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. So if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your forum page, as an example, that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it. Keeping the search engines from accessing certain pages on your site is essential for both the privacy of your site and for your SEO strategy. 

Search engines send out tiny programs called spiders or robots to search your site and bring information back to the search engines so that the pages of your site can be indexed in the search results and found by web users. Your Robots.txt file instructs these programs not to search pages on your site which you designate using a “disallow” command.

To demonstrate, the following Robots.txt command:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /forum

It would block all search engine robots from visiting the following page on your website:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

Notice that before the disallow command, you have the command:

User-agent: *

The “User-agent:” part specifies which robot you want to block and could also read as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot

This command would only block the Google robots, while other robots would still have access to the page:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

However, by using the “*” character, you’re specifying that the commands below it refer to all robots. Your Robots.txt file would be located in the main directory of your site.

For example:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

There are three reasons why you might want to block a page using the Robots.txt file. First, if you have a page on your site which is a duplicate of another page, you don’t want the robots to index it because that would result in duplicate content which can hurt your SEO.

Second, if you have a page on your site which you don’t want users to be able to access unless they take a specific action, like if you have a forum page where users get access to specific information because of the fact that they gave you their email address, you wouldn’t want people being able to find that page by doing a Google search.

And most important, you’ll want to block pages or files is when you want to protect private files in your site such as your cgi-bin.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

In all of these cases, you’ll need to include a command in your Robots.txt file that tells the search engine spiders not to access that page, not to index it in search results and not to send visitors.