So, what is a custom robot txt file? In simple terms, it’s a text file that you create to direct your website to specific pages. In this file, you will tell your webserver to look for the X-Robots-Tag (or ‘User-agent’). When you use this, you signify your webserver to let all directories crawl your website. When writing a robot’s text file, you should use the ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’ keywords to target the suitable types of bots. The Allow and Disallow lines are similar to the User-Agent commands, but the X-Robots-Tag command is more specific. It allows only particular bots to access your site, which is essential to understand. For more detailed information, you may consult Victorious SEO agents.

Allow vs. Disallow

An essential distinction between Allow and Disallow is the user-agent, which tells the search engine bots who should not visit your site. By default, the user-agent field identifies the file intended for the Bing or Yahoo! bot, while the Disallow parameter tells search engine robots which files, folders, or images should not be scanned. If your site is closed to any other robots, the disallow command should be used.

While the Allow directive specifies which parts of a site a search engine bot should not access, it also contains a disallow directive. When using the disallow directive, you should only allow certain pages, like /blog/post-title/. A disallow directive means that no search engine bots will be able to view those pages. You can disable both types of robots but only allow certain ones.

X-Robots-Tag

X-Robots-Tag is used in conjunction with the robots meta tag. It is a special header in the HTTP response header that directs a search engine bot to index specific web pages. A sitemap suggests which pages should be crawled. It also specifies the frequency of crawling. Indexer directives are set on a page-by-page basis and can also be set on a file-by-file basis. It is important to understand the implications of this file before implementing it on your website. To control search engine crawling, you can add the X-Robots-Tag response header to your website. This directive tells search engines not to index any non-HTML resources on your website. You can specify multiple X-Robots-Tag directives in one HTTP response. Unlike the preceding members, you can set different directives for different crawlers. For example, you can determine that a particular URL is not accessible for a specified period.

This header can be added to your website in various places, including your headers. In some cases, you may want to block specific elements or even pages from being crawled. You can also add a “no index” directive to particular pages. This is a powerful way to block a specific page from being shown in search results. X-Robots-Tag headers can be added to your website in a variety of ways.

X-Robots-Tag headers help protect sensitive documents. They only become effective after the server responds to a page request. They can defend backend folders of different CMSs. Browsers are less likely to crawl when your site has a custom robots-tag header.

Using the user-agent command to target bots

The user-agent command is a powerful tool to block or restrict access to certain web pages by specific bots. It identifies the browser used by a visitor. The user-agent name can be case-sensitive, so it’s crucial to ensure the name of your bot is unique. You can also specify a wildcard user agent, denoting that it will apply to all user agents.