Robots.txt best practices & tips

[JonathanRolande]

Hey,

I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on whether I should block the robots.txt file from the average user (not from googlebot, yandex, etc)?

If so, how would I go about doing this? With .htaccess I'm guessing - but not an expert.

What can people do with the information in the file? Maybe someone can give me some "best practices"? (I have a wordpress based website)

Thanks in advance!

[ThompsonPaul]

There is really no reason to block the robots.txt file from human users, Jazy. They'll never see it unless they actively go looking for it, and even if they do, it's just directives for where you want the search crawlers to go and where you want them to stay away from.

The only thing a human user will learn from this, is what sections of your site you consider to be nonessential to a search crawler. Even without the robots file, if they were really interested in this information, they could acquire it in other ways.

If you're trying to use your robots.txt file to block information about pages on your website you want to keep private or you don't want anyone to know about, doing it in the robots.txt file is the wrong place anyway. (That's done in .htaccess, which should be blocked from human readers.)

There's enough complexity to managing a website, there's no reason to add more by trying to block your robots file from human users.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[JonathanRolande]

Thanks for the detailed answer Paul!

Do you think there is anything I should block for a wordpress website? I blocked /admin.

[ThompsonPaul]

Asking about the ideal configuration for a robots.txt file for WordPress is opening a huge can of worms There's plenty of discussion and disagreement about exactly what's best, but a lot of it depends on the actual configuration and goals of your own website. That's too long a discussion to get into here, but below is what I can recommend as a pretty basic, failsafe version that should work for most sites:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

I always prefer to explicitly declare the location of my site map, even if it's in the default location.

There are other directives you can include, but they depend more on how you have handled other aspects of your website - e.g. trackbacks, comments and search results pages as well as feeds. This is where the list can get grey, as there are multiple ways to accomplish this, depending how your site is optimised, but here's a representative example.

Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /?

Sorry I can't be more specific on the above example, but it's where things really come down to how you're managing your specific site, and are a much bigger discussion. A web search for "best WordPress robots.txt file" will certainly show you the range of opinions on this.

The key thing to remember with a robots.txt file is that it does not cause blocked URLs to be removed from the index, it only stops the crawlers from traversing those pages. It's designed to help the crawlers spend their time on the pages that you have declared useful, instead of wasting their time on pages that are more administrative in nature. A crawler has a limited amount of time to spend on your site, and you want it to spend that time looking at the valuable pages, not the backend.

Paul