Robots.txt Generator

Create a properly formatted robots.txt file for your website. Control specific search engine bots and restrict access to private directories.

Search Robots

The path is relative to root and must contain a trailing slash "/"

The Complete Guide to Robots.txt and SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves many technical aspects, and one of the most critical foundational elements is the robots.txt file. This simple text file acts as the gatekeeper of your website, giving instructions to search engine crawlers (like Googlebot) about which parts of your site they can access and which they should ignore.

What is a Robots.txt File?

A robots.txt file is a text file that resides in the root directory of your website (e.g., https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt). It adheres to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots.

Without this file, search engines will assume they have permission to crawl and index every page on your site. While this might sound good, it can lead to indexing duplicates, private pages, or overloading your server.

Why You Need a Robots.txt File

  • Optimize Crawl Budget: Search engines have a limited "budget" for how many pages they will crawl on your site per day. Blocking irrelevant pages (like admin panels, cart pages, or internal search results) ensures they spend that budget on your high-value content.
  • Prevent Duplicate Content Issues: Tools often generate print versions or session-ID based URLs that are duplicates of your main content. Blocking these prevents SEO penalties.
  • Keep Private Sections Private: While not a security mechanism (hackers can ignore it), it keeps honest bots out of your staging areas, backend scripts, or generated files.
  • Server Load Management: By specifying a Crawl-delay (for bots that support it like Bing), you can prevent aggressive crawlers from slowing down your site.

Key Directives Explained

  • User-agent: Identifies which bot the rule applies to. User-agent: * applies to all bots.
  • Disallow: Tells the bot NOT to visit a specific path. Disallow: /admin/ blocks the entire admin folder.
  • Allow: Overrides a parent Disallow rule. For example, you can Disallow /wp-admin/ but Allow /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.
  • Sitemap: Points bots to your XML Sitemap to help them discover all your pages faster.

How to Use This Generator

  1. Set Default Access: Choose whether you want to allow or disallow all bots by default. "Allowed" is the standard for most public sites.
  2. Enter Sitemap URL: Paste the full URL to your XML sitemap (e.g., https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml).
  3. Configure Specific Bots: Use the grid to set rules for specific search engines. For example, you might want to allow Googlebot but refuse Baiduspider if you don't serve Chinese users.
  4. Restrict Directories: Add paths to private folders like /cgi-bin/, /tmp/, or /private/ in the "Restricted Directories" section.
  5. Generate & Save: Click "Download robots.txt", upload it to your website's root folder, and you're done!