Robots.txt Vs Meta Robots Tag: Understand what Search Engines look on your Website

TLDR

Robots Meta Tags vs. Robots.txt: Learn the crucial differences in controlling search engine crawlers for better SEO results

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. Use noindex to prevent indexing of a page or password-protect it to prevent Google from finding it..

The result looks like this, for example:

# Group 1 User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /nogooglebot/

# Group 2 User-agent: * Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
The ‘User-agent: *’ tells the robot that this rule applies to all robots, not only search engines or Google bots.

The ‘Disallow: /’ tells the robots that it is not allowed to visit any pages on this domain. When creating your robots.txt file you should be careful of what parameters you set, if your robots.txt looks like the above example this means that you website won’t be crawled by Google!

Meta Robots Tag

The best practice for SEO is to use a Meta robots tag to tell Google that they are authorised to view this page but not display it in the SERPs if you want to prevent them from crawling and indexing a certain page on your website. This is how your website's section should display your robots Meta tag:

Robots meta tags are snippets that you place in the head section of a page. They look like this:

An overview of the main meta robots tag commands available:

Index – All search engines can index the information on this website.

Follow – The internal links on the webpage can be crawled by all search engines.

Noindex – won't allow the specified page to be included in the index

Nofollow – this will prevent Google bots from following any links on the page. Note that this is different to the rel=”nofollow” link attribute.

Noarchive – prevents cached versions of the page from showing in the SERPs

Nosnippet – prevents the page from being cached and descriptions from appearing below the page in the SERPs

Noimageindex – prevents Google from indexing the images on the page

Notranslate – prevents the page from being translated into the Google SERPs

Is robots.txt file bad for SEO?

A piece of code called the robots. txt file instructs web crawlers which pages on your website they can and cannot access. Although it might not seem like a major concern if your robots. txt file is incorrectly configured, which can seriously harm the SEO of your website.

Robots meta tags vs. robots.txt – when you should use what

The key difference between robots meta tags and robots.txt is as follows.

The robots.txt file cannot be used to securely prevent content from being indexed. In some cases, incoming links may nevertheless lead to the indexing of particular information.

In order to control crawling traffic and stop image, video, and audio files from showing up in search results, Google proposes using the robots.txt file.

By using robots meta tags with the noindex instruction, you reliably prevent pages from appearing in search results. However, you cannot use them to exclude individual image, audio or video files from indexation.

Conclusion

Make sure that the two measures do not interfere with each other. If a robots.txt file prohibits the crawling of a page, for example, the crawler will not be able to read the robots meta tags. You obviously want to prevent this because it could, in some cases, result in the page being indexed.

Hocalwire CMS includes a carefully curated collection of automatically updated settings to keep up with the Google Update cycle for its search engine. As a service to our clients, we include mobile SEO implementation in our standard packages. Schedule a Demo today to learn how Hocalwire can help you transform your current codebase into a beautiful mobile experience.