Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using robots.txt

Common mistakes to avoid when using a robots.txt file include:

• Not having a robots.txt file at all, which leaves your entire site open to all crawlers without any restrictions.

• Placing the robots.txt file outside the root directory of the website, causing crawlers to miss it and crawl everything by default.

• Using default CMS-generated robots.txt files without customization, which may block important resources or allow unwanted crawling.

• Blocking canonicalized URLs that use canonical tags to manage duplicate content, preventing search engines from seeing those tags and properly indexing pages.

• Using robots.txt to "noindex" pages, which is ineffective since Google no longer respects noindex directives in robots.txt; the correct method is to use meta-robots noindex tags on the page itself.

• Blocking essential scripts and style sheets, which can harm how search engines render and understand your pages.

• Ignoring case sensitivity in URLs and directives, which can cause unintended blocking or allowing of URLs.

• Not including the sitemap URL in the robots.txt file, missing an opportunity to help crawlers discover your site structure more efficiently.

• Using one robots.txt file for multiple subdomains, which can cause incorrect crawling behavior if subdomains have different rules.

• Failing to repeat general user-agent directives in specific user-agent blocks, leading to some bots ignoring important rules.

• Using robots.txt to block sensitive areas, which is insecure because robots.txt is publicly accessible and only advisory; sensitive content should be protected by authentication or not published online.

• Incorrect use of wildcards or trailing slashes, which can cause rules to apply incorrectly or not at all.

Avoiding these mistakes ensures that search engines crawl and index your site as intended, protecting sensitive content and optimizing SEO performance.