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    4. Large robots.txt file

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    Large robots.txt file

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • ThomasHarvey
      ThomasHarvey last edited by

      We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately)

      Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down.

      Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ThomasHarvey
        ThomasHarvey last edited by

        Answered my own questions:

        https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?csw=1#file-format

        "A maximum file size may be enforced per crawler. Content which is after the maximum file size may be ignored. Google currently enforces a size limit of 500kb."

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