Tell search engines how you want them to index your website
Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 4:04 am
We're now entering a bit more complex territory. We promised not to overuse overly technical terms, so let's be as didactic as possible. In a nutshell, through robots.txt and sitemap files we can tell search engines how we want them to index our website and which pages we want (or not) to appear in their search results:
Robots.txt : This is a file that allows you to europe cell phone number list
specify access restrictions to your website for different search robots, for example in directories or specific pages that you do not want to appear in search engines. You can make specific commands for one or more robots, for example exclusively for the Google robot (Googlebot).
Sitemap : The sitemap allows you to tell search engine robots which pages of your website you want them to visit and store in their database , with the possibility of adding the date of last modification, frequency of updates or priority that you give it with respect to other pages.
Updating this file on large websites (think newspapers, for example) could be a huge effort, which is why there are plugins that do this job automatically. If a website has a good structure and an effective system of internal links, you could do without the sitemap file, so that the robot simply follows the different internal links during indexing.
A bad configuration of these files can have very negative repercussions on the SEO of a website, so the help of an expert is usually necessary to do it correctly.
Robots.txt : This is a file that allows you to europe cell phone number list
specify access restrictions to your website for different search robots, for example in directories or specific pages that you do not want to appear in search engines. You can make specific commands for one or more robots, for example exclusively for the Google robot (Googlebot).
Sitemap : The sitemap allows you to tell search engine robots which pages of your website you want them to visit and store in their database , with the possibility of adding the date of last modification, frequency of updates or priority that you give it with respect to other pages.
Updating this file on large websites (think newspapers, for example) could be a huge effort, which is why there are plugins that do this job automatically. If a website has a good structure and an effective system of internal links, you could do without the sitemap file, so that the robot simply follows the different internal links during indexing.
A bad configuration of these files can have very negative repercussions on the SEO of a website, so the help of an expert is usually necessary to do it correctly.