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How to Create Robots.txt File Online in Seconds

Let's think about your website for a moment as if it were a massive and a beautiful, public museum. Your website is full of wonderful, public galleries your blog posts, your product pages, your homepage that you want every single person in the world to be able to come and to see. But your museum also has a number of private, "staff only" areas. It has storage rooms, it has administrative offices, and it has some galleries that are still under construction and are not yet ready for the public.

Now, every single day, your beautiful museum is visited by a very special kind of a tourist. These are the "robot tourists," the tireless, automated crawlers that are sent out by the major search engines, like Google and Bing. So how do you, as the museum's director, communicate with these important, robot visitors? How do you tell them which of your doors they are allowed to open and which of your areas are strictly off-limits?

You give them a simple, a clear, and a public instruction sheet, right there at the front entrance. In the world of websites, this simple and powerful instruction sheet is a small but a mighty, text file called robots.txt. Now, I know that sounds very technical, and getting the instructions in that file wrong can have some very big and very scary consequences for your website. But what if you could create a perfect and an error-free instruction sheet, just by answering a few, simple questions? That is exactly what an online generator is for.

The "Rules of the Road" for Search Engines

Before we get into the easy "how," let's just pull back the curtain and demystify what this robots.txt file actually is. It is, at its heart, a simple, plain text file that lives in the main, root directory of your website. You can probably see the one for any major website right now by just typing their domain name and then adding /robots.txt at the end.

Its one, and only, job is to provide a set of simple suggestions to all of the well-behaved and the "polite" search engine crawlers, like the Googlebot, about which of the different parts of your site they should and they should not try to crawl and to look at. Now, it is very, very important to understand that word: "suggestions." The robots.txt file is a rulebook for the polite and the legitimate robots. Any malicious or spammy bots that come to your site will almost certainly and completely ignore it. It is not a security tool.

Why You Need to Be a Good Traffic Controller

So, why is this one, small, and simple text file so incredibly important for your modern, SEO strategy? It all comes down to being a good and an efficient, traffic controller.

The biggest and most important reason is to be able to manage your "Crawl Budget." This is a key, and a very important, concept in the world of professional SEO. Google will only allocate a certain, limited amount of its resources, which is known as your "crawl budget," to crawling your website on any given day. You do not want Google to be wasting its precious and its limited time and energy on crawling thousands of your unimportant, low-value, or duplicate pages. These could be things like your internal, site search results pages, your admin login pages, or all of your shopping cart pages. A good robots.txt file will tell Google to completely ignore all of that unimportant stuff and to focus all of its valuable attention on your most important and your most valuable content.

It is also an essential tool for preventing the indexing of thin or of duplicate content. You almost certainly have a number of pages on your site that you do not want to ever appear in the Google search results. These might be your "thank you" pages, your login pages, or the printer-friendly versions of your articles. Your robots.txt file is the very first and the most important step in being able to keep all of this content out of Google's index.

The Simple Language of Robots: User-agent and Disallow

Now, the good news is that the actual, written language that you have to use in this file is incredibly and wonderfully simple. There are really only two, main commands that you will ever need to know.

The first is the User-agent: command. This is the line where you will specify which of the different, internet robots you are currently talking to. In most cases, you will just want to be talking to all of the robots at once, and you can do this by using a simple wildcard, which is just an asterisk (*). So, your line would read: User-agent: *.

The second, and the most important, command is the Disallow: command. This is the line where you will tell the robot which specific folder or which specific page on your website it is not allowed to visit. For example, if you wanted to block a private folder, you would write: Disallow: /private-folder/. A simple but a very complete robots.txt file might look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
This is simply telling all of the search engine robots, "Hey, everyone. Welcome to my site. But please, do not try to crawl my admin folder or my shopping cart pages."

The Manual Method: A Recipe for a Costly Typo

So, for years, what was the traditional and the manual process of creating one of these important files? Well, you would have to open up a simple, plain text editor, like Notepad on a Windows PC. You would then have to manually and very, very carefully type out all of the different, User-agent and Disallow rules that you needed.

Now, the problem with this manual method is that the syntax of this file is incredibly strict and completely and totally unforgiving. A single, a tiny, and an innocent typo, a misplaced forward slash, or even a simple and an accidental, capitalization error can either make your rule completely not work, or, in the absolute, worst-case scenario, you could accidentally disallow your entire website. For example, a simple and an easy-to-make typo that results in the line Disallow: / would be a complete and a total catastrophe. This would tell every single search engine in the world to completely ignore your entire website. This is a very, very high-stakes file to be trying to create by hand, especially if you are not a seasoned expert.

The Simple, Error-Proof Solution: The Robots.txt Generator

This pressing need for a perfectly formatted and a completely and totally error-proof set of rules is exactly why every single, smart webmaster, from a beginner to a seasoned professional, now uses a Robots.txt Generator.

This type of tool is a simple, a guided, and a form-based utility that does all of the hard and of the scary work of writing the perfectly formatted file for you. The workflow is an absolute dream. Instead of you having to try and to remember and to manually type out all of the different commands and all of the correct syntax, you just have to use a simple and a very user-friendly, graphical interface. You might have a simple, default setting to be able to "Allow All" of the robots, and then you will have a simple text box where you can add all of the specific and the individual directories that you want to disallow. The tool will then take all of your simple instructions and it will generate the perfectly formatted and the completely, syntactically correct robots.txt file for you. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of intuitive and safe tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can create these absolutely crucial instructions for the search engines, without ever having to have the fear of making a costly and a catastrophic mistake.

What to Look For in a Great Robots.txt Generation Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most useful ones are designed to be completely foolproof and to help you to adhere to all of Google's best practices. A really top-notch online tool for creating your robots.txt file should have a few key features. It should include:

• A simple, a clear, and a guided interface that has some very easy-to-understand options for you to be able to set your default rules, such as allowing all of the robots or disallowing all of them.
   
• A set of simple and easy-to-use fields for you to be able to add all of the specific directories or the individual pages to your "disallow" list.
   
• The ability for you to be able to create custom and specific rules for all of the different and the specific bots, for example, for the Googlebot versus the Bingbot.
   
• A fantastic and a very important feature that will allow you to be able to easily add the location of your website's sitemap, which is a crucial and a modern, best practice.
   
• A clean, a simple, and an easy-to-read output that gives you the final and the ready-to-copy text for your file.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern and for any serious website owner.

The Final Human Check: You're the Chief of Security

Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple tool user into a smart and a strategic webmaster. The online tool will generate a technically perfect file for you, based on the instructions that you have given it. But you are the one who knows your own website's structure.

After you have generated the file, you must always take a few moments to read it and to do a quick, common-sense check. Ask yourself the simple questions. Did you accidentally and unintentionally disallow a very important section of your site, like your main blog? Is the final syntax of the file exactly what you intended for it to be? And before you ever upload that file to your live server, you should always, always use Google's own, and completely free, "robots.txt Tester" tool, which you can find inside of your Google Search Console account. This will allow you to be 100% sure that Google is interpreting all of your rules in the exact way that you expect it to. The generator is the thing that creates the rules; you are the one who must verify that they are the right rules.

Be a Good Host to Your Robot Visitors

Let’s be honest, your robots.txt file is the single most important instruction sheet that you will ever give to the search engines. And getting it exactly right is absolutely crucial for a good and a healthy, technical SEO foundation. A simple, online generator is the safest, the easiest, and the most reliable way to be able to create a perfectly formatted file, without ever having to have the risk of you making a catastrophic and a costly typo.

So, it is time to stop ignoring this small but incredibly mighty, little file. It's time to be a good and a gracious host to all of the important, search engine bots that are visiting your site every single day. By using a simple online tool to create a clear and a correct robots.txt file, you can expertly guide them to all of your most important content, you can help them to be able to use their precious crawl budget wisely, and you can build a strong and a solid foundation for your website's long-term, SEO success. It is the smart, the simple, and the professional way to be able to manage your site.