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
-
Disavow File
After uploading a Google disavow file how long does it take to be processed? Before any trolls get going, not been doing anything dogy, looks like someone has been trying some negative seo on us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Robots.txt advice
Hey Guys, Have you ever seen coding like this in a robots.txt, I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you? user-agent: AhrefsBot User-agent: trovitBot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London
User-agent: Nutch
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: / User-agent: *
Disallow: /WebServices/
Disallow: /*?notfound=
Disallow: /?list=
Noindex: /?*list=
Noindex: /local/
Disallow: /local/
Noindex: /handle/
Disallow: /handle/
Noindex: /Handle/
Disallow: /Handle/
Noindex: /localsites/
Disallow: /localsites/
Noindex: /search/
Disallow: /search/
Noindex: /Search/
Disallow: /Search/
Disallow: ? I have never seen a noindex rule in a robots.txt file before - have you?
Any pointers?0 -
Not sure how we're blocking homepage in robots.txt; meta description not shown
Hi folks! We had a question come in from a client who needs assistance with their robots.txt file. Metadata for their homepage and select other pages isn't appearing in SERPs. Instead they get the usual message "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more". At first glance, we're not seeing the homepage or these other pages as being blocked by their robots.txt file: http://www.t2tea.com/robots.txt. Does anyone see what we can't? Any thoughts are massively appreciated! P.S. They used wildcards to ensure the rules were applied for all locale subdirectories, e.g. /en/au/, /en/us/, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchDeploy0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
I have two sitemaps which partly duplicate - one is blocked by robots.txt but can't figure out why!
Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
301 redirect or Robots.txt on an interstatial page
Hey guys, I have an affiliate tracking system that works like this : an affiliate puts up a certain code on his site, for example : www.domain.com/track/aff_id This url leads to a page where the hit is counted, analysed and then 302 redirects to my sales page with the affiliates ID in the url : www.mysalespage.com/?=aff_id. However, we've noticed recently that one affiliate seems to be ranking for our own name and the url google indexed was his tracking url (domain.com/track/aff_id). Which is strange because there is absolutely nothing on that page, its just an interstatial page so that our stats tracking software can properly filter hits. To remove the affiliate's url from showing up in the serps, I've come up with 2 solutions : 1 - Change the redirect to a 301 redirect on his track page. 2 - Change our robots.txt page to block all domain.com/track/ pages from being indexed. My question is : if I 301 redirect instead of 302, will I keep the affiliates from outranking me for my own name AND pass on link juice or should I simply block google from crawling the interstatial tracking pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
What content should I block in wodpress with robots.txt?
I need to know if anyone has tips on creating a good robots.txt. I have read a lot of info, but I am just not clear on what I should allow and not allow on wordpress. For example there are pages and posts, then attachments, wp-admin, wp-content and so on. Does anyone have a good robots.txt guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO0