Technology is just a single word but consists of a huge pull of elements which include software and hardware devices and codes as well. Among them, Robot Txt and meta robot are playing a huge role in controlling the web page visitors limit on seeing the website. These two tools both work for directing the limits of crawling but in a different manner and which brings a slight difference in their work process and also in functioning.

What is Meant by Robot.txt File?

Robot.txt is the webmaster which controls the search engine robots or the web robots to see the sections of web pages. It controls the crawling in web pages. The robots exclusion protocol plays an important role in this section. Robot Txt is the part of robots exclusion protocol under which it regulates the robots to crawl the web page which directs to access the index and produce the content to users.

Under robots exclusion protocol there are many tools which are called directives and those directives control the visibility of the sections of the web page. If the directives direct some restriction with codes then, the web page visitors will get access to the web page with the restrictions.

How Does Robot.txt Work?

To allow any section of the web page to the visitors to crawl or to disallow there are certain codes that you need to use with the help of robot.txt the common codes are Disallow: /administrator/ which will help to disallow the visitors to see the administrator section. These codes are quite simple to understand and work nicely as directives.

The search engines have two major jobs which are crawling the web page to discover entire content and also put that content into the index for easy access to further search with the same keywords. In the case of robot.txt directives, they work particularly on these two functions of search engines. Either they allow some of the content to be visible for that particular search engine or else they disallow some of the contents of the web pages to the search engines.

Robot.txt for SEO

Optimizing the search engine has been a highly important and robot.txt helps to optimize it better. For SEO robot.txt can control the search engine robots to get access to the web page in certain restrictions.

Common examples of using robot.txt for SEO

For Googlebot

Allow: .js

Allow: .css

For yahoo to restrict Slurp

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Common terms of using robot.txt

1. User-agent

2. Disallow

3. Allow

4. Crawl-delay

5. Sitemap

Here is the Syntax to check the robots.txt file https://learnimtactics.com/robots.txt

What is Meant by Robot Meta Tags?

Under robot exclusion protocol there are multiple directives which function to filter the accessibility of the web page by the browser or search engines. Among all those directives robot meta tag is also one. Robot Meta Tags are of two different types and those are visible in the form of HTML and HTTP. Both of these tags work in an equal process but is placed as per the need. The robot meta tags control the crawling of the web page by the search engines.

Terms used as Robot Meta Tags

1. Noindex

2. Index

3. Follow

4. Nofollow

5. Noimageindex

6. None

7. Norarchive

8. Hocache

9. Nosnippet

10. Moody/nodir

11. Unavailable_after

Types of Robot Meta Tags

As we have already mentioned that robot meta tags work on HTTP and HTLM and the tags different for both of these. The basic meta robot tag is a part of HTML code which is visible in the head section of the web page. And the X robot tags are the one which is a part of HTTP and present in the header and controls the indexing of the web page.

Example

Meta tag-

X tag- x-robots-tag: noindex, nofollow, nosnippet

Importance of Robot Meta Tags in SEO

Here the meta tags work in combination with robot.txt. generally, the robot.txt does not allow to crawl the web page by seeing the directives present in the HTLML and HTTP tags.

Conclusion

The robot.txt and meta robot tags both are most prominent directives of robot exclusive protocol and both play an important role in controlling the visibility of web pages in different search engines or browsers.

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