What is a Robots.txt File?

A robots.txt file is a simple text file placed in your website's root directory that tells search engine crawlers which pages they can and cannot request from your site. It is primarily used to manage crawl traffic and prevent search engines from indexing private or low-value areas of your website.

The Importance of Adding a Sitemap to Robots.txt

Including your sitemap URL in your robots.txt file is one of the most effective ways to ensure search engines discover your content. While you can submit sitemaps directly via search consoles, the robots.txt entry acts as a universal beacon for all bots (including smaller search engines) to find your site map automatically.

Key Directives Explained

• User-agent: Specifies which bot the rules apply to (e.g., Googlebot or '*' for all bots).
• Disallow: Tells the bot not to visit specific folders or pages (like /wp-admin/ or /cgi-bin/).
• Allow: Tells the bot it can visit a specific sub-folder even if the parent folder is disallowed.
• Crawl-delay: Asks bots to wait a specific number of seconds between requests to avoid over-loading your server.