If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?

[binhlai]

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!

[iKrishna]

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.

[sarahwalsh]

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.

[Alick300]

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