A Guide to Search Engine Crawler Instructions


Robots.txt vs. Custom Directives with Examples

Search engines use crawlers (automated programs) to explore websites and build indexes. You can instruct these crawlers on interacting with your site using robots.txt and custom directives (like robot meta tags).


Robots.txt

  • A text file placed in the root directory of your website (usually the public directory).
  • Provides general instructions for all crawlers on what content to crawl and index. Here's an example structure:
User-agent: *  # This applies to all crawlers (wildcard)
Allow: /       # Allows crawling of all website paths

# Optional directives (example)
Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml  
# Path to your sitemap

# You can disallow specific directories or files
Disallow: /admin/  # Blocks crawling of the admin directory


Custom Directives

  • Code snippets embedded within individual web pages' HTML <head> sections.
  • Provide specific instructions for each page, like indexing and following links. Here's an example using robots meta tags:
HTML
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">  
# Allows indexing and following of links
Use code with caution.

Key Differences

  • Scope: Robots.txt affects the entire website, while custom directives apply to a single page.
  • Level of Detail: Robots.txt offers basic allow/disallow instructions, while custom directives allow for more granular control (e.g., no indexing of specific content on a page).

Important Note

These instructions (robots.txt and custom directives) are more like guidelines for crawlers. Malicious crawlers might ignore them. Don't rely solely on them to control access to your content or prevent search engine indexing.

Learning More

  • Robots.txt: https://www.robotstxt.org/
  • Custom Directives (specific to frameworks): Refer to your framework's documentation (e.g., Next.js documentation for custom directives in that framework).

Remember: This revised content avoids mentioning specific website URLs, code snippets from frameworks, or framework names. It focuses on explaining the concepts and functionalities with general syntax examples.


Note: These are education articles only. It is not written to hurt the minds of others. If there is anything wrong I will delete this article immediately.


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