Professional Robots.txt Generator

A robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of your website they are allowed to access. It follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol and is placed in the root directory of your website.

While not strictly necessary, a robots.txt file is highly recommended for proper SEO. It helps you:

• Prevent crawling of duplicate or low-value content
• Conserve crawl budget for important pages
• Block access to private or administrative areas
• Guide search engines to your sitemap

You can request that search engines don't crawl certain parts of your site, but note that:

• Robots.txt directives are requests, not commands
• Blocked pages might still be indexed if linked from other sites
• For complete blocking, use noindex meta tags or password protection

Update your robots.txt file whenever you:

• Add new sections to your site that should be blocked
• Restructure your site's URL architecture
• Add a new sitemap location
• Change your crawl-delay settings

It's good practice to review your robots.txt file quarterly.

The robots.txt file must be located in the root directory of your website. For example, if your domain is example.com, the robots.txt file should be accessible at https://example.com/robots.txt.

Search engines will not look for robots.txt in subdirectories, so placing it anywhere else will render it ineffective.

Yes, most major search engines support wildcards in robots.txt files:

• * matches any sequence of characters
• $ matches the end of a URL

For example, Disallow: /*.pdf$ would block all PDF files on your site.

However, use wildcards carefully as they can sometimes block more content than intended.

The crawl-delay directive tells search engines how many seconds to wait between successive requests to your server. This helps prevent your server from being overwhelmed by crawler traffic.

For example, Crawl-delay: 10 would tell crawlers to wait 10 seconds between requests.

Note that not all search engines respect the crawl-delay directive. Google, for example, ignores it in favor of its own internal algorithms.

Yes, it's highly recommended to include your sitemap URL in your robots.txt file. This helps search engines discover your sitemap more easily, which can improve the indexing of your content.

The sitemap directive should be placed at the end of your robots.txt file, like this: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

You can include multiple sitemap directives if you have multiple sitemaps.

There are several ways to test your robots.txt file:

• Use the robots.txt tester in Google Search Console
• Use our URL Access Tester tool on this page
• Manually check if your file is accessible at yourdomain.com/robots.txt
• Validate the syntax using online validators

Testing is important to ensure you haven't accidentally blocked important content from being crawled.

Disallow and noindex serve different purposes:

• Disallow (in robots.txt) tells search engines not to crawl a page
• Noindex (in meta tags) tells search engines not to index a page in their search results

Important: If you disallow a page but don't noindex it, search engines might still index the page based on links from other sites, but they won't know what content is on the page because they didn't crawl it.

For complete removal from search results, you typically need both to block crawling and prevent indexing, or use password protection.