robots tester

Robots.txt Testing Tool

This tool will help you make sure if a URL is allowed or blocked from crawling and indexing your website by checking your robots.txt in seconds. The robots.txt file is part of the robots exclusion protocol, which is a group of web standards that govern how robots crawl the web, access content, index it, and then serve it to users accordingly. The REP, robots exclusion protocol, also incorporates directives like meta robots, subdirectory-, page-, or site-wide instructions for links like the "follow" or "nofollow" orders. Robots.txt files help you control the visibility of your website pages to all sorts of crawlers. It also enables you to manage crawl traffic to prevent redundant files or pages from appearing in SERPs and therefore wasting what's known as your crawl budget.\

There are several factors that go into sites being crawled or indexed. In some cases, if it's a recently launched website, crawl bots may not get to it as soon as you want. Deindexation can also result from poorly designed layouts or website structures which affect user experience and can come in the way of search engine bots crawling and indexing your site. Additionally, deindexation can happen due to an error that occurred when the crawl bot was attempting to crawl your site, or maybe your policy is blocking crawl bots. To know if your website is indexed or not, you can enter the URL of your domain with the following command "site:" before it in the search box, like the following: "site:bruceclaymena.com". The search results that will appear will show all of your indexed website pages.

Why and How to Implement A Robots.txt File?

To control the visibility of your website pages and make sure necessary pages are being efficiently crawled and indexed, you can submit a sitemap directly. The sitemap will notify search engines of any updated or newly added page son your website. If you want to inform search engines to disregard specific web pages for whatever reason, here is where the robots.txt comes handy. It is a necessary file that instructs crawlers on how to crawl your website correctly, and it is used primarily to avoid overloading your site with useless requests. You can create a user-friendly robots.txt file through Google Search Console's robots.txt generator.

Testing Your Robots.txt File

By using this robots.txt testing tool, you will be able to make sure that your robots.txt file is not blocking crawlers from accessing essential elements like image files, CSS or JavaScript, which can be very harmful to how your website is rendered and indexed by different user agents. For example, if Googlebot is blocked from accessing these elements, it can substantially affect your rankings. Use this free robots.txt testing tool from Bruce Clay and make sure if Googlebot, Googlebot for Smartphones, Adspot, Facebook, Twitter, Bingbot, Baidu, and 20+ more user agents are allowed to crawl specific web pages from your website or not.