The robots.txt file guides search engine crawlers on which parts of a website they can or cannot access. It’s a crucial tool for managing crawl budgets, protecting sensitive pages, and optimizing SEO performance.

Search Engine Land has published an article answering the question, ‘Robots.txt: SEO landmine or secret weapon?’.

Willie Vitari says, “Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which parts of your website they can and cannot access. When incorrectly configured, this simple file can destroy months of SEO work with a single misplaced character.

Picture this: A developer at a mid-sized ecommerce company pushed what seemed like a routine update on a Thursday afternoon. Twenty-four hours later, organic traffic had dropped 90%. The culprit? A robots.txt file from their staging environment accidentally deployed to production, containing just two lines: “User-agent: *” followed by “Disallow: /”. And just like that, years of SEO progress vanished from Google’s index.

Sound far-fetched? It really isn’t.”

Robots.txt: SEO landmine or secret weapon?

Search Engine Land

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