Don't Forget Your Website's Robots.txt file

When you create a website, eventually each search engine sends out a robot (or "spider") to look over and categorize what your site is all about. It reads through your text and follows your link to learn and understand what your site has to offer. You can control what each spider sees and doesn't see on your website by creating what's called a "robots.txt" file.

The robots.txt file contains instructions on what the spiders are allowed (and not allowed) to look through on your site. They are very simple to create and implement but many people are unsure as to how they work.

First of all, you create it using a basic text editor, like Notepad in the Windows environment. There are only 3 main parts of the file. The "allow" command, the "disallow" command, and the " * " wildcard.

Use the disallow to indicate sections of your website you do not want indexed. As in this example:

Disallow: /workfiles/

This tells the spiders "don't index any files in the workfiles folder of my site." The "allow" command is basically redundant since the spiders will go through everything it can get to that has not been marked with a "disallow". So you can safely just use "disallow". The asterisk (" * ") is a wildcard indicator that indicates "all engines". So in this example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /My_Files/

We see that "all" spiders are directed to not index the My_Files folder.

You place the robots.txt file in the root folder of your web site. A robots.txt file is a good idea since it keeps the spiders from looking through sections of your web space you may want to keep private, for example you may have a website that is in development but not yet ready to go live. So if you don't have one, review your web hosting directories and get typing in your text editor. It will only take a few minutes but the benefits can be substantial.