You Don’t Need Robots.txt On Root Domain, Says Google

In the realm of Search Engine Optimization, robots.txt files have been a constant part of site owners and SEO professionals.

To their surprise, Google has announced that they might not need robots.txt on their root domain, which eventually has raised several questions.

What are Robots.txt files?

Robots.txt files are useful components that are usually present in the root directory of a website.  It works along with the engine crawlers by providing them with information regarding which pages to crawl through and index and which should not be crawled through as they may be duplicated or under progress pages.

When Did the Robots.txt File Come into Existence?

Back in the year 1994, the robots.txt file first came into existence. It was introduced by Martijn Koster.

It was a simple mechanism by which site owners could deny some basic access to certain pages from being crawled and indexed by the Googlebot.

Over the years this robots.txt file has updated itself and enhanced its efficiency. Though in the latest news, Google mentioned that robots.txt files are no longer mandatory still it hold a value.

What does Google have to say about this?

Illyes explains robots.txt files’ flexibility addressing the point that it is allowed to have two different robots.txt files on different domains.

This offers several benefits which include:

• You can simplify your management and make sure this change gets updated across several websites by combining robots.txt rules on a content delivery network.
• The conflicts between your main domain and content delivery network can be decreased if robots.txt rules depend on a single source.
• If your website is too complex as you may have several subdomains and content delivery networks this method would offer you flexibility.
• Websites that do not have a robots.txt file on their root domain won’t face any penalty from Google as without the robots.txt files in the root domain the Googlebot can still function and be able to crawl and index the page.
• Other than robots.txt files Google highlights that you can use meta tags to enhance the crawler behaviour.
• For small websites that do not need much crawler management are at an advantage due to the absence of robots.txt files.

What Could be the Potential Role of Robots.txt in Modern SEO?

• Especially for large websites maintaining and managing the crawl budget can be difficult. The number of pages a Googlebot crawls through within a given period is known as the crawl budget.
• If you want Googlebot to focus on only the important pages and avoid the duplicate ones make sure to block the access to low-value pages.
• On your website there might be certain sections whose privacy needs to be maintained. By utilizing the robots.txt file you can protect such sensitive and crucial files by not giving access to Googlebot to crawl and index those pages.
• Also, if you have some work in progress on any of your web pages you can block the Googlebot from crawling and indexing that page.

How to Use a Robots.txt file?

• Make sure to have a simple and clear robots.txt file as it will be easy to maintain and less subjected to possible errors.
• Keep a regular check on your website to make sure you do not give access to duplicate or under-process content to Googlebot to crawl and index them.
• You can utilize Google’s txt tester tool to make sure your robots.txt file is working appropriately in blocking and allowing the concerned pages.
• You can improve your page indexing by combining meta tags along with robots.txt files.

Conclusion

The site owners and SEO professionals are very used to having robots.txt files on their root domain, as announced by Google these are no longer important. The absence of these files won’t harm your site. Rather you can now centralize robots.txt files on content delivery networks (CDNs). Though Google has mentioned you do not need robots.txt files still it has a lot of advantages for site owners to control the crawling behaviour.

By understanding how to use robots.txt files along with other SEO tools you can easily optimize your page for Googlebot to crawl through and index the pages to enhance the user experience.