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Robots.txt Files

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Instructions for robots

The robots.txt file is a simple text file placed on your web server, which tells web crawlers whether or not they should access a file on your website. The robots.txt file controls how search engine spiders see and interact with your web pages.

If there are any areas of your site that you would rather a search engine didn’t crawl – i.e. that you don’t want it to index – you can issue a robots.txt file that disallows the URL path that you ultimately want to block.

If you disallow any page that contains a forward slash, you can block all access to the site. You can also block individual folders or image files if you wish them not to be crawled. (See slide ‘Instructions for robots’ for examples of these instructions.)

You can check if a site has a robots.txt file from any browser. The robots.txt file is always located in the same place on any website, so it is easy to determine if a site has one. Just add "/robots.txt" to the end of a domain name.

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Shane Lyons

Shane Lyons is head of Search & Analytics at Mediaworks, an award-winning media and communications agency. He has been working in Digital both in Ireland and abroad for the last 8 years and now specializes in SEO and Analytics.

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    SEO Setup
    Shane Lyons
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    This module introduces the key concepts for setting up SEO and the elements to consider before beginning an SEO project. It outlines the key technical elements you need to consider when implementing SEO, how to implement on-page SEO, and how to implement SEO in a mobile environment. It explains how a business can improve its SEO strategy and local SEO. It also demonstrates how to measure and report on the effectiveness of your SEO campaign and the key SEO metrics to measure.