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What is the robots.txt file and How to Manage it in WordPress
Understanding the Role of the Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file serves as a guide for web crawling software, providing them with directives when they visit a site. This simple text document is crucial for website owners who want to manage how search engine bots interact with their online content.
How Search Engines Utilize Web Crawlers
Web crawlers, also known as web robots, are employed by search engines such as Google to gather data and organize the vast amount of content available on the internet. These crawlers typically look for a robots.txt file as their first step when they land on a site. The file’s directives inform them about the site owner’s preferences regarding the indexing and crawling of their web pages.
Directives Within Robots.txt
Within the robots.txt file, site administrators can specify which parts of their site should be excluded from the crawling process. This might be to safeguard private information or simply because they deem certain files and directories as not beneficial for search engine classification.
Subdomains and Compliance with Robots.txt WordPress
For websites that operate multiple subdomains, it’s essential for each one to have an individual robots.txt file. However, it’s worth acknowledging that not every bot will comply with the instructions in a robots.txt file. In fact, some harmful bots are programmed to scan the robots.txt file specifically to identify which areas they should infiltrate. Furthermore, even if a robots.txt file advises bots to overlook certain pages, these pages might still be indexed and appear in search results if other crawled pages link to them.