If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
-
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage.
Please help!
-
One word answer: NO
Robots.txt informs search engine crawlers (bots) about which web pages should and should not be crawled and indexed. It uses directives like Allow and Disallow to specify these instructions.
If you haven't added a robots.txt file to your website, it generally means search engine crawlers will assume permission to crawl all your publicly accessible web pages.
This can have both positive and negative consequences:
Positive Impacts:
- Complete Indexing: All your web pages that are publicly available will likely be crawled and indexed by search engines, potentially improving your website's discoverability in search results.
Negative Impacts:
-
Unnecessary Crawling: Search engines might crawl pages that aren't valuable for search results, such as login pages, duplicate content, or temporary files. This can overload your server with unnecessary requests.
-
Confidentiality Issues: If you have any sensitive information on your website that shouldn't be publicly indexed (like internal documents or admin pages), it might get crawled without a robots.txt blocking it.
It's generally recommended to create a robots.txt file to:
- Prevent crawling of unimportant pages.
- list itemProtect confidential information.
- list itemInstruct crawlers on how to crawl your site efficiently.
Just for your reference check this website robots.txt.
-
Googlebot might not index all pages and blog posts unless you have a robot.txt. We added one to our garden office company website; we noticed organic seo improvements are within the month, we gained more sales.
-
Hi,
No, your website will work just fine without a robots.txt file.
Without a robots.txt file search engines will have a free run to crawl and index anything they find on the website. This is fine for most websites but it’s really good practice to at least point out where your XML sitemap is so search engines can find new content without having to slowly crawl through all the pages on your website and bumping into them days later.
It shouldn't go to homepage if mywebsite.com/robot.txt doesn't exist shoud go to custom 404 error page.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Are links to our website through our affiliate program hurting our rankings?
We have an affiliate program for an educational related course product and I am becoming worried that links to us on our affiliate's websites are hurting our site rankings. I have read that google is usually pretty good about picking up on affiliate links and not giving the follow links credit, but not sure if that is just for the big affiliate networks or if they can spot less obvious affiliate programs. With this in mind, would you ask all affiliates to use the nofollow tag on all links coming in, or would you make sure that the links are more branded in nature? There are a mix of text links along with banners and other display components. There would be editing that would need to be done to the core files of our affiliate/member software (aMember Pro) to make all links nofollow and we want to see if there are other recommendations before doing so. We are trying to fight out way out of what we believe is an over-optimized anchor text penalty and are evaluating all areas that we can make improvements. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | youngb550 -
Why Is This Page Not Ranking?
Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Search Engine Blocked by robots.txt for Dynamic URLs
Today, I was checking crawl diagnostics for my website. I found warning for search engine blocked by robots.txt I have added following syntax to robots.txt file for all dynamic URLs. Disallow: /*?osCsid Disallow: /*?q= Disallow: /*?dir= Disallow: /*?p= Disallow: /*?limit= Disallow: /*review-form Dynamic URLs are as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/bar-stools?dir=desc&order=position http://www.vistastores.com/bathroom-lighting?p=2 and many more... So, Why should it shows me warning for this? Does it really matter or any other solution for these kind of dynamic URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0