What Is Robots.txt File?
Robots.txt file is a file in text format on a web server. That tells a search engine’s spiders not to crawl a specific page or folders on a website.
Almost all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing accept robots.txt file requests.
Why Robots.txt file Is Important for a website?
According to google Robots.txt file use to manage the traffic of crawlers to your website.
It is essential for your website, like a door in each room of your home.
In a simple word, a website without Robots.txt file is similar to a home without a door in any room.
Suppose you don’t have a door in your house what will happen?
Any person can access any place inside your home, even those place which you don’t want to show anyone.
Similarly, if you will don’t use robots.txt file for your website.
Search engine will crawl any page and file on your webserver.
And they will index that in their search result. Even that page also which you don’t want to index in Google.
Limitation of Robots.txt
1. It may be not supported by all Search Engines
Googlebot and other Respectable web crawlers follow the instructions in the robots.txt file. But not every web crawler needs to follow the same.
Therefore if you want to secured information from a web crawler on your web server, you can use another blocking method.
2. A page Can Be Indexed Even that blocked by robots.txt
According to google they will not crawl and index a web page of a website which is blocked by robots.txt.
But they still find and index that page if they will find that link by another website. And that page can even appear in the search result.
3. Different crawlers think of syntax differently
However, respectable web spiders follow the instructions in a robots.txt file.
Every spider may interpret the instructions differently.
You should know the proper syntax for addressing various web crawlers as some may not understand specific instructions.