Robots.txt is a text file designed by webmasters to order web robots (search engine robots). The file is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access content, and serve it to users. The REP is also a part of directives like meta robots and site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat links.

A robot.txt file in practice decides whether certain user agents (web crawling software) can or cannot crawl parts of sites. A robot.txt file in practice decides whether certain user agents (web crawling software) can or cannot crawl parts of sites. These crawl directives are processed by “approving” or “rejecting” the behavior of certain (or all) user agents.
Now, how do robots.txt files work? When people search for anything on search engines, the search bot finds the website to display the results. But before displaying the results, or even indexing them, it searches for the robots.txt file of the website, if there is any. If there is one, the bot goes through it to check the allowed and disallowed pages of the site. It ignores all the disallowed pages sited on the file and goes on to show the allowed contents in the results. Thus, it can only see the allowed content by the owner of the site.
Sometimes, you can use Robots.txt files to block entire pages of your site.

There are a few reasons why you can use these files in this manner. First of all, if there is a page on your site which is a replica of another page, you don’t want the robots to index it because that would result in duplicate content, hurting your SEO.

The next reason to use this file is to maximize the optimum utilization of your crawl budget. If you are having a tough time getting all your pages indexed, you might have a crawl budget problem. By blocking unimportant pages with the robots.txt files, Googlebot can spend more of your crawl on the pages that actually matter.

Although using meta directives has been prevalent overusing robots.txt files, robots.txt files hold the upper hand in one case. Using meta directives are equally preferable as robots.txt for preventing pages from getting indexed. That is where robots.txt prove to be more useful.

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