The WordPress robots.txt file helps search engines and other crawlers understand which pages you want to show up in search results and which ones you don’t want to show up in the search results. This means that optimizing your WordPress robots.txt file can help you rank higher in search results, keep competitors from stealing your website traffic, and prevent unnecessary crawling of your website (which can sometimes slow down or even crash your website). The following are three on how to optimize your wordpress robots txt for seo.
1) Create a disallow Rule
The easiest way to optimize your site is by creating a disallow rule in your site’s robots.txt file, which will keep your Googlebot from indexing certain pages on your site that you want to keep out of search results. like error pages or those protected by CAPTCHA. Disallow rules are an exclusion that tells Google not to crawl specific files or folders, allowing you to optimize only what you want to be indexed on your website and keeping irrelevant content off search engine result pages (SERPs). In some cases, it may be more appropriate to block a folder using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) rather than with the Robots meta tag. When this happens, you should use REP tags rather than meta tags to exclude unwanted content from being indexed.
2) Remove the Noindex Tag from Pages in Archive Categories
Posts by category is a useful archive page type, but it has one negative side effect: It stops search engines from indexing individual posts in that category. Even though most search engine crawlers won’t try to access an individual post in your archives, you should still specify whether they should follow links within them or not, which is exactly what robots.txt does. For some pages, this isn’t an issue because the content of the pages is more important than its rank on Google and the other search engines. Something That is often forgotten about in optimizing blog posts for google rankings is how to optimize your wordpress robot’s text file so that it doesn’t show up as duplicate content.
3) Add Your robots rules to .htaccess
Robots meta tags are not going to take you very far in today’s search landscape, especially if you want to remove the indexing of some or all of your content. The most powerful tool you have at your disposal is your .htaccess file, and luckily there’s no coding involved when it comes to implementing a noindex rule, all you need is a few lines of text. For example, let’s say you wanted to tell the search engines not to crawl specific pages on your site. Just add the following line of code to your website’s root directory: Disallow: /test-page/ Replace test-page with the directory path where you would like Googlebot to avoid crawling.
Bottom line
WordPress’s default robot text file is kind of a mess, so it’s easy to make SEO mistakes if you don’t know what you’re doing. Luckily, fixing these errors only takes a few minutes and can boost your site’s performance on Google search results pages (SERPs). Read on for tips on how to optimize your WordPress robots text file, and why you should do it in the first place.
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