Technical SEO Ranking Factors: Part Two

First part of the article.

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Managing the robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is used to control how your site is indexed by search engines. It allows you to specify which pages or directories of the site should be indexed and which should not.

Here are the basic rules for working with this file:

• This is a text file that should be saved in plain text format (ASCII or UTF-8) and named robots.txt.
• The file is created in text editors such as Notepad rather than proprietary format editors such as Microsoft Word.
• The robots.txt file should be located in the root directory of your site. For example, for a site at http://example.com, the file should be available at http://example.com/robots.txt.
• For sites built with certain CMSs, a robots.txt file can be generated automatically.

Inside the robots.txt file, the crawler checks for directives starting with the User-agent field. This field indicates the specific search engine robot to which the corresponding indexing rule applies.

When describing addresses on a website, you can use the universal symbol “*”, which denotes any sequence of characters. This allows you to specify a prefix or suffix of the path to a directory or page.

Here are some basic directives that can be used in a robots.txt file:

• Disalov: Specifies which pages or directories should not be indexed by the search robot. If a directory name is specified, the path must end with a slash.
• Allov: This directive allows indexing of specific pages or directories that may have been restricted by the Disallow directive. The "*" character is supported to denote different paths.
• Sitemap: Specifies the path to the Sitemap file. It may be optional and appear in multiple copies. A sitemap helps search engines index site pages faster.
• Unknown directives are ignored, allowing comments to be added within the file.

It's also worth noting that the robots.txt file requirements may vary slightly depending on the search engine. To find out the latest recommendations for popular systems such as Yandex or Google, check out their official sources.

If you have any questions, you can always contact the specialists of our SEO studio by writing to info@seo.computer.

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