XML Sitemap instruction in robots.txt = Worth doing?
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Hi fellow SEO's,
Just a quick one, I was reading a few guides on Bing Webmaster tools and found that you can use the robots.txt file to point crawlers/bots to your XML sitemap (they don't look for it by default).
I was just wondering if it would be worth creating a robots.txt file purely for the purpose of pointing bots to the XML sitemap?
I've submitted it manually to Google and Bing webmaster tools but I was thinking more for the other bots (I.e. Mozbot, the SEOmoz bot?).
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Regards,
Ash
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Thanks for the answer and link John!
Regards,
Ash
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I think it's worth it as it should only take a few minutes to set up, and it's good to have a robots.txt, even if it's allowing everything. Put a text file named "robots.txt" in your root directory with:
<code>User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml</code>Read more about robots.txt here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt.
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It is not going to make any difference. Time is better spend in fixing crawling & indexing issues of the website.
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