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6 Common Robots.txt Issues And How To Fix Them

Robots.txt is a simple and effective tool for instructing search engine crawlers to explore your website. The best part is that by repairing your robots.txt file, you will be able to recover quickly and (usually) entirely from any errors. Therefore, in this article, we’ll look at some of the common robots.txt issues and how to fix these issues.

Contents

1 What Exactly Is Robots.txt?
2 6 Common Robots.txt Errors
3 Conclusion

What Exactly Is Robots.txt?

A plaintext file named Robots.txt is located in your website’s root directory.

It must be near the top of your website’s ranking; putting it in a subdirectory will cause search engines like Google to ignore it.

Despite its power, robots.txt is a straightforward doc. A basic robots.txt file may be produced in a matter of seconds using an editor like Notepad.

6 Common Robots.txt Errors

Some of the common robots.txt issues include:

There is no Robots.txt file in the root directory.

To resolve this issue, copy your robots.txt file to your root directory.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that you may need root access to your server to do this.

no robots.txt file in the root directory — Source: GeeksforGeeks

Because some content management systems will put information under a media subdirectory (or something similar), you may want to avoid this to get your robots.txt file in the right place.

Ineffective use of wildcards.

To resolve a wildcard issue, locate the incorrect wildcard.

Moreover, move or remove it so that your robots.txt file functions correctly.

In Robots.txt, no index is specified.

One option is to use the robot’s meta tag.

Moreover, putting this code at the top of any web page you don’t want Google to index is easy.

Scripts and stylesheets are being blocked.

Check to discover if you’re blocking crawler access to critical external information, if your sites are performing weirdly in Google’s results or if it appears that Google isn’t viewing them correctly.

Therefore the road obstructing entry can be easily removed from your robots.txt file.

Additionally, if you have sensitive data that you don’t want to lose, add an exception that allows you to reaccess the necessary CSS and JavaScript.

There is no Sitemap URL.

Although this isn’t strictly an error because lacking a sitemap shouldn’t affect your website’s precise core performance and look in search results, it’s nonetheless price incorporating your sitemap URL to robots.txt if you want to boost your website placement efforts.

Access to construction sites

Check your robots.txt file for a universal user agent prohibits rule if your development site looks to be receiving real-world traffic or if your newly released website isn’t performing well in search:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /

access to construction sites — Source: Moz

If you see this, make the necessary changes to your robots.txt file. Additionally, double-check that your website’s search appearance changes accordingly.

Conclusion

Therefore, if your website is performing strangely in search results, your robots.txt file is an excellent place to look for mistakes, syntax issues, and overreaching guidelines.