People are often confused by robots.txt file and what they are. They are a text file on your website that instructs a robot what to index and how to crawl through your website. Sometimes companies do not want certain web pages from their website to display on search engines, the robots.txt file can help prevent that. These text files can also save on bandwidth by excluding photos, videos, and JavaScript.

It is not a requirement to include a robot.txt file on your website but it is incredibly beneficial to an SEO campaign as it helps search engine robots to index the correct pages of a website. It does not prevent a robot from crawling your webpage, however it does instruct them on how to do so correctly. By doing so, your search engine result ranking can improve quite a bit. Correct indexing is one of the key factors of a successful SEO campaign.

A robot.txt file is found in the main directory of your website to help the search engine robots find it. These robots are not specifically looking for these files but will obey them when they come across them in the main directory. In your robot.txt file, you can specify which pages to ignore, and this means that the search engine robot will focus solely on those files that have not been excluded.

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