
This is how you add the robots.txt file to your website.Īdding a robots.txt file to your website is very easy. This can lead to spammy requests that will slow down your website significantly. Bots can also come in good faith, but most bots don't understand simple redirects like 403, 500, and 404.

Not every bot out there comes in good faith, and that's the bots that we would like to discourage from crawling our website. Some of these "bad" bots are using methods like a brute force attack to guess usernames and passwords. Some are scanning your website to find vulnerabilities that can let others get access to your database or break your website completely. Not all bots visit your website just to crawl it. Bots does not understand redirects and some brute force attacks. They find your website somewhere on the internet and goes through every page to check if your content is worth displaying in search results. Most bots on the internet have the simple purpose of crawling every website to show them in search results on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. The good bots crawl your website to show it in search results, and the bad are spammy and might try to brute-force certain functions on your website.
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Without this set of rules, bots have no way of knowing how to interact with your website, and if there are routes you don't want to be indexed. The robots.txt file contains a set of rules for your website and which user agents it applies. We disallow all user agents but then afterward allow the Google bot to crawl our website: User-agent: * Here is a simple example of how a robots.txt file could look like. In a later section of this article, we go through what describes a bad bot and what is describing a good bot. The robots.txt file contains the rules/law of your website and the good bots are likely to follow these rules while the bad bots won't. Here you can read more about what a robots.txt file is. The commands you give the user agent could be to disallow certain routes or wildcards. To make the rules of your website more specific you can specify the user agent which refers to the specific crawler. Its content is not made up of HTML, but instead, it contains simple words such as "Allow" and "Disallow". In short: A robots.txt file is a set of instructions made for bots roaming around the internet. You will get a general understanding of how the robots.txt file works and why it's a good idea to use it on your website. In this article, we will explore the robots.txt file and see how we can block unwanted and spammy bots. It's the reality for many website owners, and most of them don't even know that it is happening.

One day a spammy bot might stop by your website and decide to terrorize you with requests that will slow down your website or even break it. Your website might be fast right now, but one day that could change. Block unwanted and spammy bots with robots.txt and speed up your website
