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asseo · 4 years ago

Text

What is Google Algorithm for SEO used by the Digital Marketing Agencies?

Google updates often pressurize fear into the hearts of each seo and marketing crew across the globe. The latest update in July 2021 has rocked everyone globally, but the focal point remains on the user experience. There are numerous guidelines and suggestions to ensure your seo is on top; however, seo still relies on how nicely a user receives the site. According to the Best Digital Marketing Agency in Kolkata Clunky, boring, and difficult-to-use web pages will not do properly, regardless of how well they score in seo, because people will stop visiting your website.

All websites worldwide are crawled through Googlebot, that's liable for analyzing them to establish a relevant ranking inside the search results. We will see here Googlebot's unique actions, its expectancies, and the tricks used by it.

GoogleBot

Googlebot is a virtual robot evolved via engineers at the massive's Mountain View offices. This little "Wall-E of the net" quickly visits websites before indexing a few of their pages. This machine program searches for and reads websites' content and modifies its index according to the information that it reveals. The index, wherein search results are saved, is a type of Google's brain. This is where all its data is stored.

Google uses lots of small devices to send its crawlers to each corner of the web to discover pages, to look at what's on them. There are numerous unique robots, each with a well-defined motive. For instance, AdSense and AdsBot are liable for checking paid advertisements' relevance, while Android mobile Apps tests Android apps. There may also be pictures, Googlebot, news, and so on.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This document describes how HTML elements ought to be displayed on the screen. It saves much time; that is why the style sheets practice all through the website. It could even manipulate several websites' formats at the same time. Googlebot does not just examine textual content; and it also downloads CSS files to recognize a page's overall content better.

Come across feasible manipulation attempts via websites to mislead robots and higher position themselves (the most well-known: cloaking and white police on a white background).

download a few pics (logo, pictograms, and so on.)

study the tips for responsive layout that are essential to reveal that a website is appropriate for mobile browsing.

Google would not explain an entire lot about how those work; however, it has presented what determines search results, consisting of:

The that means and motive of a query

How relevant a specific webpage is to that query

The quality and reliability of the content on the stated webpage

The usability of the web page

The context and settings associated with the character carrying out the search consist of location, previous searches, and any settings on the Google account.

How Does Google Calculate search rankings?

SERPs exist to satisfy a specific need: connecting people to data. While a user searches for a product or a service, Google strives to scour the net to discover the most relevant and beneficial bits of content to be had.

In other words, Google is attempting to emulate us—the readers—in determining the quality, relevance, and benefit of a website's content and ranking it consequently.

The hassle of Calculating search rankings

Though, terms like quality and relevance are instinctive. There aren't any black-and-white approaches to filter out content by using these qualifiers, so Google has to depend upon heuristic metrics that offer a close (however no longer ideal) approximation of quality.

The most famous among them are keywords and backlinks. However, Google had found all possibilities in its analysis over time. According to the Best Digital Marketing Agency in Kolkata Google's first generation in 2000, each of these metrics had been used as stand-ins for content quality:

ALT and <H> tags

Content freshness

Content length

Keyword density

Backlink quality (determined by PageRank)

Backlink quantity

Meta descriptions

Anchor text

Bold and italic words

Internal links

Social shares

Do You Want to Improve SEO?

ASSEO is the Best SEO Company in Kolkata, providing high-level digital marketing and search engine optimization services for online businesses. They are the Best Digital marketing agency in Kolkata for affordable and high-quality search engine optimization, social media optimization, pay-per-click management, and search engine marketing services.

#best digital marketing agency in kolkata

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freshleadprovider · 4 years ago

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Do pages crawled by AdsBot-Google get processed for Google search index?

I see a lot more hits from AdsBot-Google than from Googlebot. I do use AdSense and Google Ads. But hits from AdsBot-Google outnumber hits from Googlebot and Mediapartners-Google by a factor of 10. And hits from AdsBot-Google are not just for my landing pages in Google Ads. Which is what AdsBot-Google is normally for. But AdsBot-Google crawls tens of thousands of URLs on my website. Does Google use data crawled with AdsBot-Google for search indexing? submitted by /u/uRh3f5BfFgjw74FGv3gf [link] [comments] https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/mprx4m/do_pages_crawled_by_adsbotgoogle_get_processed/

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techyblogger · 4 years ago

Photo

Do pages crawled by AdsBot-Google get processed for Google search index? https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/mprx4m/do_pages_crawled_by_adsbotgoogle_get_processed/

I see a lot more hits from AdsBot-Google than from Googlebot.

I do use AdSense and Google Ads. But hits from AdsBot-Google outnumber hits from Googlebot and Mediapartners-Google by a factor of 10.

And hits from AdsBot-Google are not just for my landing pages in Google Ads. Which is what AdsBot-Google is normally for.

But AdsBot-Google crawls tens of thousands of URLs on my website.

Does Google use data crawled with AdsBot-Google for search indexing?

submitted by /u/uRh3f5BfFgjw74FGv3gf [link] [comments] April 13, 2021 at 06:43AM

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webdesignersolutions · 5 years ago

Link

Hi,

I am building a website for a personal project, nothing of wide interest or ever commercially relevant. As expected I am not getting many visitors, so be it.

However my logs show a large increase in traffic since last month, and it is all coming from Adsbot/3.1 from various IPs of hosted.static.webnx.com. This guy is scraping the full page several times per day, even though my content is completely static and I upload updates only every few weeks. The rest of my traffic is as expected, Bingbot and Googlebot have larger portions and the rest are random accesses from around the world.

I have already checked some of the bot databases, they all tell the same: Bot of unknown origin, hosted at webnx, ignores robots.txt and scrapes full site. My question really is: What possible motive can they have to scrape my site fully several times per day? My real fear is that as an inexperienced site owner I am falling victim for some kind of abuse that I am unaware of.

Submitted September 27, 2020 at 05:03AM by territrades https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/j0pz7v/adsbot_causes_80_of_my_traffic_why/?utm_source=ifttt

from Blogger http://webdesignersolutions1.blogspot.com/2020/09/adsbot-causes-80-of-my-traffic-why.html via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

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technowap · 5 years ago

Text

How to Create a robots.txt file in WordPress | Wordpress Robots txt

How to create Wordpress Robots txt File Step by step guide

How to create Robots.txt file for wordpress? A robots.txt file has an important role for the SEO of a WordPress blog. The robots.txt file decides how the search engine bots will crawl your blog / website. Today I am going to tell how to create robots.txt file is created and updated for wordpress. Because if you make even a small mistake while editing Robots.txt, then your blog will never be indexed in the search engine. So let's know what a Robots.txt file is and how to create a perfect robots.txt file for WordPress.

How to Create a robots.txt file in WordPress | Wordpress Robots txt

What is Robots.txt?

Whenever search engine bots come to your blog, they follow all the links on that page and crawl and index them. Only after this, your blog and post, pages show in search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex etc. As its name suggests, robots.txt is a text file that resides in the root directory of the website. Search engine bots follow the rules laid down in Robots.txt to crawl your blog. In a blog or website, apart from post, there are many other things like pages, category, tags, comments etc. But all these things are not useful for a search engine. Generally traffic comes from the search engine on a blog from its main url (https://ift.tt/3iT2kWl), posts, pages or images, apart from these things like archaive, pagination, wp-admin are not necessary for the search engine. Here robots.txt instructs search engine bots not to crawl such unnecessary pages. If you ever had a mail of index coverage on your Gmail, then you must have seen this kind of massage; New issue found: Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt Robots.txt is not allowed to crawl your URL here, that is why that url is blocked for search engine. That means, which web pages of your blog will show in Google or Bing and what not, it decides the robots.txt file. In this, any mistake can remove your entire blog from the search engine. So new bloggers are afraid to create it themselves. If you have not yet updated the robots.txt file in the blog, then firstly you understand some of its basic rules and create a perfect seo optimized robots.txt file for your blog.

How to Create WordPress Robots.txt file?

On any wordpress blog you get a default robots.txt file. But for better performace and seo of your blog, you have to customize this robots.txt according to yourself. Wordpress default robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: / wp-admin / Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Sitemap: [Blog URL] /sitemap.xml As you can see above some code / syntax is used for robots.txt. But most of you bloggers use these syntax in their blog without understanding it. First you understand the meaning of these syntax, after that you can create a proper robots.txt code for your blog by yourself. User-Agent: It is used to give instructions to Search Engines Crawlers / Bots. User-agent: * This means all search engine bots (Ex: googlebot, bingbot etc.) can crawl your site. User-agent: googlebot Only Google bot is allowed to crawl here. Allow: This tag allows search engine bots to crawl your web pages and folder. Disallow: This prevents syntax bots from crawl and indexing, so that no one else can access them. 1. If you want to index all the pages and directories of your site. You may have seen this syntax in the Blogger robots.txt file. User-agent: * Disallow: 2. But this code will block all the pages and directories of your site from being indexed. User-agent: * Disallow: / 3. If you use Adsense, then only use this code. This is for AdSense robots that manage ads. User-agent: Mediapartners-Google * Allow: / Example: If such a robots.txt file is there, let us know what is the meaning of the rules given in it; User-agent: * Allow: / wp-content / uploads / Disallow: / wp-content / plugins / Disallow: / wp- admin / Disallow: / archives / Disallow: / refer / Sitemap: https://ift.tt/1M7RHY8 Whatever files you upload images from within Wordpress are saved in / wp-content / uploads /. So this code allows the permision to index all i robots.txt file. It is not necessary that you also do the robots.txt code that I use. User-agent: * Disallow: / cgi-bin / Disallow: / wp-admin / Disallow: / archives / Disallow: / *? * Disallow: / comments / feed / Disallow: / refer / Disallow: /index.php Disallow: / wp-content / plugins / User-agent: Mediapartners-Google * Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Image Allow: / wp-content / uploads / User-agent: Adsbot-Google Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Allow: / Sitemap: https://ift.tt/1M7RHY8 Note: replace the sitemap of your blog under Sitemap here.

How to update robots.txt file in wordpress

You can manually update the robots.txt file by going to the root directory under wordpress hosting, or there are many plugins available through which you can add to the dashboard of wordpress. But today I will tell you the easiest way, how you can update robots.txt code in wordpress blog with the help of Yoast SEO plugin. Step 1: If you have a blog on wordpress, then you must be using Yoast SEO plugin to be seo. First go to Yoast SEO and click on Tools button. Here three tools will be open in front of you, you have to click on File Editor. Step 2: After clicking on the file editor, a page will open, click on the Create robots.txt file button under the Robots.txt section here. Step 3: In the box below Next Robots.txt, you remove the default code, paste the robots.txt code given above and click on Save Changes to Robot.txt. After updating the robots.txt file in WordPress, it is necessary to check whether there is any error in the Search Console through the robots.txt tester tool. This tool will automatically fetch your website's robots.txt file and will show it if there are errors and warnings. The main goal of your robots.txt file is to prevent the search engine from crawling pages that are not required to be made public. Hope this guide will help you to create a seo optimized robots.txt code. Conclusion:- So in this article i have complete guide you How to Create a robots.txt file in WordPress. Check this robots.txt by robots.txt checker. If you like this article then Help other bloggers by sharing this post as much as possible. Also Read This What is Instagram Reels how to use Instagram Reels? Best Chrome Extension 2020 | Top 10 to Install in 2020

How to Create a robots.txt file in WordPress | Wordpress Robots txt SEO Tips via exercisesfatburnig.blogspot.com https://ift.tt/2Ygv3fX

#SEO Tips

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mccullytech · 6 years ago

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The ultimate guide to robots.txt

The robots.txt file is one of the main ways of telling a search engine where it can and can’t go on your website. All major search engines support the basic functionality it offers, but some of them respond to some extra rules which can be useful too. This guide covers all the ways to use robots.txt on your website, but, while it looks simple, any mistakes you make in your robots.txt can seriously harm your site, so make sure you read and understand the whole of this article before you dive in.

Want to learn all about technical SEO? Our Technical SEO bundle is on sale today: you��ll get a $40 discount if you get it now. This bundle combines our Technical SEO training and Structured data training. After completing this course, you’ll be able to detect and fix technical errors; optimize site speed and implement structured data. Don’t wait!

What is a robots.txt file?

What does the robots.txt file do?

Where should I put my robots.txt file?

Pros and cons of using robots.txt

Pro: managing crawl budget

Con: not removing a page from search results

Con: not spreading link value

robots.txt syntax

The User-agent directive

The most common user agents for search engine spiders

The Disallow directive

How to use wildcards/regular expressions

Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives

The Allow directive

The host directive

The crawl-delay directive

The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps

Validate your robots.txt

What is a robots.txt file?

Crawl directives

The robots.txt file is one of a number of crawl directives. We have guides on all of them and you’ll find them here:

Crawl directives guides by Yoast »

A robots.txt file is a text file which is read by search engine spiders and follows a strict syntax. These spiders are also called robots – hence the name – and the syntax of the file is strict simply because it has to be computer readable. That means there’s no room for error here – something is either 1, or 0.

Also called the “Robots Exclusion Protocol”, the robots.txt file is the result of a consensus among early search engine spider developers. It’s not an official standard set by any standards organization, but all major search engines adhere to it.

What does the robots.txt file do?

humans.txt

Once upon a time, some developers sat down and decided that, since the web is supposed to be for humans, and since robots get a file on a website, the humans who built it should have one, too. So they created the humans.txt standard as a way of letting people know who worked on a website, amongst other things.

Search engines index the web by spidering pages, following links to go from site A to site B to site C and so on. Before a search engine spiders any page on a domain it hasn’t encountered before, it will open that domain’s robots.txt file, which tells the search engine which URLs on that site it’s allowed to index.

Search engines typically cache the contents of the robots.txt, but will usually refresh it several times a day, so changes will be reflected fairly quickly.

Where should I put my robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file should always be at the root of your domain. So if your domain is www.example.com, it should be found at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

It’s also very important that your robots.txt file is actually called robots.txt. The name is case sensitive, so get that right or it just won’t work.

Pros and cons of using robots.txt

Pro: managing crawl budget

It’s generally understood that a search spider arrives at a website with a pre-determined “allowance” for how many pages it will crawl (or, how much resource/time it’ll spend, based on a site’s authority/size/reputation), and SEOs call this the crawl budget. This means that if you block sections of your site from the search engine spider, you can allow your crawl budget to be used for other sections.

It can sometimes be highly beneficial to block the search engines from crawling problematic sections of your site, especially on sites where a lot of SEO clean-up has to be done. Once you’ve tidied things up, the you can let them back in.

A note on blocking query parameters

One situation where crawl budget is particularly important is when your site uses a lot of query string parameters to filter and sort. Let’s say you have 10 different query parameters, each with different values that can be used in any combination. This leads to hundreds if not thousands of possible URLs. Blocking all query parameters from being crawled will help make sure the search engine only spiders your site’s main URLs and won’t go into the enormous trap that you’d otherwise create.

This line blocks all URLs on your site containing a query string:

Disallow: /*?*

Con: not removing a page from search results

Even though you can use the robots.txt file to tell a spider where it can’t go on your site, you can’t use it tell a search engine which URLs not to show in the search results – in other words, blocking it won’t stop it from being indexed. If the search engine finds enough links to that URL, it will include it, it will just not know what’s on that page. So your result will look like this:

If you want to reliably block a page from showing up in the search results, you need to use a meta robots noindex tag. That means that, in order to find the noindex tag, the search engine has to be able to access that page, so don’t block it with robots.txt.

Noindex directives

It remains an ongoing area of research and contention in SEO as to whether adding ‘noindex’ directives in your robots.txt file enables you to control indexing behaviour, and, to avoid these ‘fragments’ showing up in search engines. Test results vary, and, the search engines are unclear on what is and isn’t supported.

Con: not spreading link value

If a search engine can’t crawl a page, it can’t spread the link value across the links on that page. When a page is blocked with robots.txt, it’s a dead-end. Any link value which might have flowed to (and through) that page is lost.

robots.txt syntax

WordPress robots.txt

We have an entire article on how best to setup your robots.txt for WordPress. Don’t forget you can edit your site’s robots.txt file in the Yoast SEO Tools → File editor section.

A robots.txt file consists of one or more blocks of directives, each starting with a user-agent line. The “user-agent” is the name of the specific spider it addresses. You can either have one block for all search engines, using a wildcard for the user-agent, or specific blocks for specific search engines. A search engine spider will always pick the block that best matches its name.

These blocks look like this (don’t be scared, we’ll explain below):

User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /not-for-bing/

Directives like Allow and Disallow should not be case sensitive, so it’s up to you whether you write them lowercase or capitalize them. The values are case sensitive however, /photo/ is not the same as /Photo/. We like to capitalize directives because it makes the file easier (for humans) to read.

The User-agent directive

The first bit of every block of directives is the user-agent, which identifies a specific spider. The user-agent field is matched against that specific spider’s (usually longer) user-agent, so for instance the most common spider from Google has the following user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

So if you want to tell this spider what to do, a relatively simple User-agent: Googlebot line will do the trick.

Most search engines have multiple spiders. They will use a specific spider for their normal index, for their ad programs, for images, for videos, etc.

Search engines will always choose the most specific block of directives they can find. Say you have 3 sets of directives: one for *, one for Googlebot and one for Googlebot-News. If a bot comes by whose user-agent is Googlebot-Video, it would follow the Googlebot restrictions. A bot with the user-agent Googlebot-News would use the more specific Googlebot-News directives.

The most common user agents for search engine spiders

Here’s a list of the user-agents you can use in your robots.txt file to match the most commonly used search engines:

Search engineFieldUser-agentBaiduGeneralbaiduspiderBaiduImagesbaiduspider-imageBaiduMobilebaiduspider-mobileBaiduNewsbaiduspider-newsBaiduVideobaiduspider-videoBingGeneralbingbotBingGeneralmsnbotBingImages & Videomsnbot-mediaBingAdsadidxbotGoogleGeneralGooglebotGoogleImagesGooglebot-ImageGoogleMobileGooglebot-MobileGoogleNewsGooglebot-NewsGoogleVideoGooglebot-VideoGoogleAdSenseMediapartners-GoogleGoogleAdWordsAdsBot-GoogleYahoo!GeneralslurpYandexGeneralyandex

The Disallow directive

The second line in any block of directives is the Disallow line. You can have one or more of these lines, specifying which parts of the site the specified spider can’t access. An empty Disallow line means you’re not disallowing anything, so basically it means that a spider can access all sections of your site.

The example below would block all search engines that “listen” to robots.txt from crawling your site.

User-agent: * Disallow: /

The example below would, with only one character less, allow all search engines to crawl your entire site.

User-agent: * Disallow:

The example below would block Google from crawling the Photo directory on your site – and everything in it.

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /Photo

This means all the subdirectories of the /Photo directory would also not be spidered. It would not block Google from crawling the /photo directory, as these lines are case sensitive.

This would also block Google from accessing URLs containing /Photo, such as /Photography/.

How to use wildcards/regular expressions

“Officially”, the robots.txt standard doesn’t support regular expressions or wildcards, however, all major search engines do understand it. This means you can use lines like this to block groups of files:

Disallow: /*.php Disallow: /copyrighted-images/*.jpg

In the example above, * is expanded to whatever filename it matches. Note that the rest of the line is still case sensitive, so the second line above will not block a file called /copyrighted-images/example.JPG from being crawled.

Some search engines, like Google, allow for more complicated regular expressions, but be aware that some search engines might not understand this logic. The most useful feature this adds is the $, which indicates the end of a URL. In the following example you can see what this does:

Disallow: /*.php$

This means /index.php can’t be indexed, but /index.php?p=1 could be. Of course, this is only useful in very specific circumstances and also pretty dangerous: it’s easy to unblock things you didn’t actually want to unblock.

Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives

As well as the Disallow and User-agent directives there are a couple of other crawl directives you can use. These directives are not supported by all search engine crawlers so make sure you’re aware of their limitations.

The Allow directive

While not in the original “specification”, there was talk very early on of an allow directive. Most search engines seem to understand it, and it allows for simple, and very readable directives like this:

Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

The only other way of achieving the same result without an allow directive would have been to specifically disallow every single file in the wp-admin folder.

The host directive

Supported by Yandex (and not by Google, despite what some posts say), this directive lets you decide whether you want the search engine to show example.com or www.example.com. Simply specifying it like this does the trick:

host: example.com

But because only Yandex supports the host directive, we wouldn’t advise you to rely on it, especially as it doesn’t allow you to define a scheme (http or https) either. A better solution that works for all search engines would be to 301 redirect the hostnames that you don’t want in the index to the version that you do want. In our case, we redirect www.yoast.com to yoast.com.

The crawl-delay directive

Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex can sometimes be fairly crawl-hungry, but luckily they all respond to the crawl-delay directive, which slows them down. And while these search engines have slightly different ways of reading the directive, the end result is basically the same.

A line like the one below would instruct Yahoo! and Bing to wait 10 seconds after a crawl action, while Yandex would only access your site once in every 10 seconds. It’s a semantic difference, but still interesting to know. Here’s the example crawl-delay line:

crawl-delay: 10

Do take care when using the crawl-delay directive. By setting a crawl delay of 10 seconds you’re only allowing these search engines to access 8,640 pages a day. This might seem plenty for a small site, but on large sites it isn’t very many. On the other hand, if you get next to no traffic from these search engines, it’s a good way to save some bandwidth.

The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps

Using the sitemap directive you can tell search engines – specifically Bing, Yandex and Google – where to find your XML sitemap. You can, of course, also submit your XML sitemaps to each search engine using their respective webmaster tools solutions, and we strongly recommend you do, because search engine webmaster tools programs will give you lots of valuable information about your site. If you don’t want to do that, adding a sitemap line to your robots.txt is a good quick alternative.

Validate your robots.txt

There are various tools out there that can help you validate your robots.txt, but when it comes to validating crawl directives, we always prefer to go to the source. Google has a robots.txt testing tool in its Google Search Console (under the ‘Old version’ menu) and we’d highly recommend using that:

Be sure to test your changes thoroughly before you put them live! You wouldn’t be the first to accidentally use robots.txt to block your entire site, and to slip into search engine oblivion!

Read more: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

The post The ultimate guide to robots.txt appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/ultimate-guide-robots-txt/

#Yoast • SEO for everyone

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seocompanysurrey · 6 years ago

Text

The ultimate guide to robots.txt

Want to learn all about technical SEO? Our Technical SEO bundle is on sale today: you’ll get a $40 discount if you get it now. This bundle combines our Technical SEO training and Structured data training. After completing this course, you’ll be able to detect and fix technical errors; optimize site speed and implement structured data. Don’t wait!

What is a robots.txt file?

What does the robots.txt file do?

Where should I put my robots.txt file?

Pros and cons of using robots.txt

Pro: managing crawl budget

Con: not removing a page from search results

Con: not spreading link value

robots.txt syntax

The User-agent directive

The most common user agents for search engine spiders

The Disallow directive

How to use wildcards/regular expressions

Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives

The Allow directive

The host directive

The crawl-delay directive

The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps

Validate your robots.txt

What is a robots.txt file?

Crawl directives

The robots.txt file is one of a number of crawl directives. We have guides on all of them and you’ll find them here:

Crawl directives guides by Yoast »

What does the robots.txt file do?

humans.txt

Search engines typically cache the contents of the robots.txt, but will usually refresh it several times a day, so changes will be reflected fairly quickly.

Where should I put my robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file should always be at the root of your domain. So if your domain is www.example.com, it should be found at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

It’s also very important that your robots.txt file is actually called robots.txt. The name is case sensitive, so get that right or it just won’t work.

Pros and cons of using robots.txt

Pro: managing crawl budget

A note on blocking query parameters

This line blocks all URLs on your site containing a query string:

Disallow: /*?*

Con: not removing a page from search results

Noindex directives

Con: not spreading link value

robots.txt syntax

WordPress robots.txt

We have an entire article on how best to setup your robots.txt for WordPress. Don’t forget you can edit your site’s robots.txt file in the Yoast SEO Tools → File editor section.

These blocks look like this (don’t be scared, we’ll explain below):

User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /not-for-bing/

The User-agent directive

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

So if you want to tell this spider what to do, a relatively simple User-agent: Googlebot line will do the trick.

Most search engines have multiple spiders. They will use a specific spider for their normal index, for their ad programs, for images, for videos, etc.

The most common user agents for search engine spiders

Here’s a list of the user-agents you can use in your robots.txt file to match the most commonly used search engines:

The Disallow directive

The example below would block all search engines that “listen” to robots.txt from crawling your site.

User-agent: * Disallow: /

The example below would, with only one character less, allow all search engines to crawl your entire site.

User-agent: * Disallow:

The example below would block Google from crawling the Photo directory on your site – and everything in it.

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /Photo

This means all the subdirectories of the /Photo directory would also not be spidered. It would not block Google from crawling the /photo directory, as these lines are case sensitive.

This would also block Google from accessing URLs containing /Photo, such as /Photography/.

How to use wildcards/regular expressions

Disallow: /*.php Disallow: /copyrighted-images/*.jpg

Disallow: /*.php$

Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives

The Allow directive

Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

The only other way of achieving the same result without an allow directive would have been to specifically disallow every single file in the wp-admin folder.

The host directive

host: example.com

The crawl-delay directive

crawl-delay: 10

The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps

Validate your robots.txt

Be sure to test your changes thoroughly before you put them live! You wouldn’t be the first to accidentally use robots.txt to block your entire site, and to slip into search engine oblivion!

Read more: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

The post The ultimate guide to robots.txt appeared first on Yoast.

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davidrsmithlove · 6 years ago

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Free web-based robots.txt parser based on Google’s open source C++ parser

The punchline: I’ve been playing around with a toy project recently and have deployed it as a free web-based tool for checking how Google will parse your robots.txt files, given that their own online tool does not replicate actual Googlebot behaviour. Check it out at realrobotstxt.com.

While preparing for my recent presentation at SearchLove London, I got mildly obsessed by the way that the deeper I dug into how robots.txt files work, the more surprising things I found, and the more places I found where there was conflicting information from different sources. Google’s open source robots.txt parser should have made everything easy by not only complying with their newly-published draft specification, but also by apparently being real production Google code.

Two challenges led me further down the rabbit hole that ultimately led to me building a web-based tool:

It’s a C++ project, so needs to be compiled, which requires at least some programming / code administration skills, so I didn’t feel like it was especially accessible to the wider search community

When I got it compiled and played with it, I discovered that it was missing crucial Google-specific functionality to enable us to see how Google crawlers like the images and video crawlers will interpret robots.txt files

Ways this tool differs from other resources

Apart from the benefit of being a web-based tool rather than requiring compilation to run locally, my realrobotstxt.com tool should be 100% compliant with the draft specification that Google released, as it is entirely powered by their open source tool except for two specific changes that I made to bring it in line with my understanding of how real Google crawlers work:

Googlebot-image, Googlebot-video and Googlebot-news(*) should all fall back on obeying Googlebot directives if there are no rulesets specifically targeting their own individual user agents - we have verified that this is at least how the images bot behaves in the real world

Google has a range of bots (AdsBot-Google, AdsBot-Google-Mobile, and the AdSense bot, Mediapartners-Google) which apparently ignore User-agent: * directives and only obey rulesets specifically targeting their own individual user agents

[(*) Note: unrelated to the tweaks I’ve made, but relevant because I mentioned Googlebot-news, it is very much not well-known that Googlebot-news is not a crawler and hasn’t been since 2011, apparently. If you didn’t know this, don’t worry - you’re not alone. I only learned it recently, and it’s pretty hard to discern from the documentation which regularly refers to it as a crawler. The only real official reference I can find is the blog post announcing its retirement. I mean, it makes sense to me, because having different crawlers for web and news search opens up dangerous cloaking opportunities, but why then refer to it as a crawler’s user agent throughout the docs? It seems, though I haven’t been able to test this in real life, as though rules directly targeting Googlebot-news function somewhat like a Google News-specific noindex. This is very confusing, because regular Googlebot blocking does not keep URLs out of the web index, but there you go.]

I expect to see the Search Console robots.txt checker retired soon

We have seen a gradual move to turn off old Search Console features and I expect that the robots.txt checker will be retired soon. Googlers have recently been referring recently to it being out of step with how their actual crawlers work - and we can see differences in our own testing:

These cases seem to be handled correctly by the open source parser - here’s my web-based tool on the exact same scenario:

This felt like all the more reason for me to release my web-based version, as the only official web-based tool we have is out of date and likely going away. Who knows whether Google will release an updated version based on their open source parser - but until they do, my tool might prove useful to some people.

I’d like to see the documentation updated

Unfortunately, while I can make a pull request against the open source code, I can’t do the same with Google documentation. Despite implications out of Google that the old Search Console checker isn’t in sync with real Googlebot, and hence shouldn’t be trusted as the authoritative answer about how Google will parse a robots.txt file, references to it remain widespread in the documentation:

Introduction to robots.txt

Avoid common mistakes

Create a robots.txt file

Test your robots.txt with the robots.txt Tester

Submit your updated robots.txt to Google

Debugging your pages

In addition, although it’s natural that old blog posts might not be updated with new information, these are still prominently ranking for some related searches:

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Testing robots.txt files made easier

Who knows. Maybe they’ll update the docs with links to my tool ;)

Let me know if it’s useful to you

Anyway. I hope you find my tool useful - I enjoyed hacking around with a bit of C++ and Python to make it - it’s good to have a “maker” project on the go sometimes when your day job doesn’t involve shipping code. If you spot any weirdness, have questions, or just find it useful, please drop me a note to let me know. You can find me on Twitter.

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ronijashworth · 6 years ago

Text

Free web-based robots.txt parser based on Google’s open source C++ parser

Two challenges led me further down the rabbit hole that ultimately led to me building a web-based tool:

Ways this tool differs from other resources

I expect to see the Search Console robots.txt checker retired soon

These cases seem to be handled correctly by the open source parser - here’s my web-based tool on the exact same scenario:

I’d like to see the documentation updated

Introduction to robots.txt

Avoid common mistakes

Create a robots.txt file

Test your robots.txt with the robots.txt Tester

Submit your updated robots.txt to Google

Debugging your pages

In addition, although it’s natural that old blog posts might not be updated with new information, these are still prominently ranking for some related searches:

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Testing robots.txt files made easier

Who knows. Maybe they’ll update the docs with links to my tool ;)

Let me know if it’s useful to you

from Digital Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/free-web-based-robotstxt-parser/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#digital marketing

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anthonykrierion · 6 years ago

Text

Free web-based robots.txt parser based on Google’s open source C++ parser

Two challenges led me further down the rabbit hole that ultimately led to me building a web-based tool:

Ways this tool differs from other resources

I expect to see the Search Console robots.txt checker retired soon

These cases seem to be handled correctly by the open source parser - here’s my web-based tool on the exact same scenario:

I’d like to see the documentation updated

Introduction to robots.txt

Avoid common mistakes

Create a robots.txt file

Test your robots.txt with the robots.txt Tester

Submit your updated robots.txt to Google

Debugging your pages

In addition, although it’s natural that old blog posts might not be updated with new information, these are still prominently ranking for some related searches:

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Testing robots.txt files made easier

Who knows. Maybe they’ll update the docs with links to my tool ;)

Let me know if it’s useful to you

Free web-based robots.txt parser based on Google’s open source C++ parser was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

#Video And Blog Marketing

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heavenwheel · 6 years ago

Text

Free web-based robots.txt parser based on Google’s open source C++ parser

Two challenges led me further down the rabbit hole that ultimately led to me building a web-based tool:

Ways this tool differs from other resources

I expect to see the Search Console robots.txt checker retired soon

These cases seem to be handled correctly by the open source parser - here’s my web-based tool on the exact same scenario:

I’d like to see the documentation updated

Introduction to robots.txt

Avoid common mistakes

Create a robots.txt file

Test your robots.txt with the robots.txt Tester

Submit your updated robots.txt to Google

Debugging your pages

In addition, although it’s natural that old blog posts might not be updated with new information, these are still prominently ranking for some related searches:

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Testing robots.txt files made easier

Who knows. Maybe they’ll update the docs with links to my tool ;)

Let me know if it’s useful to you

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/free-web-based-robotstxt-parser/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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