If you have an online business and do not know what a robots.txt, or robots exclusion standard file is then I am here to help you understand why you need one.

Having a robots.txt file can be beneficial to your web site in a variety of ways

1. Saving Bandwidth:

Search engine spider robots and web robots will not visit certain areas of your web site that you can choose to restrict access to such as your cgi bin or certain images you store on your server for personal use.

2. Cleans Up Your Logs:

If you’ve submitted your web site to the search engines than the spider robots will be searching for your robots.txt file. If they do not find one the robot generates a ‘404 File Not Found’ error everytime. These robots might be searching for that file several times a day. Adding the file to your root directory will help eliminate these errors and boost your rankings.

3. Online Protection:

The search engine robots, unless instructed otherwise by your robots.txt file, will attempt to index as much of your web site as possible. This means that if you have confidential documents or files on your server your competition might be able to find them online.

4. Avoid Unwanted Indexing:

Sometimes as a webmaster we might be developing ‘test’ or ‘development’ versions of our web site which are not ready for public viewing. You can use a robots.txt file to prevent this content from being indexed and therefore avoid any potential problems.
�
5. Robots Are For Professionals:

If you are a professional web designer / web programmer than you need a robots.txt file. Only amateurs in the game of web design do not use one. To learn how to create a robots.txt file in a variety of ways visit our other online marketing blog post “Robots.txt File Generator”

Newsletter: Learn how to grow your business in only a few months. Join the Caffeine Marketing Tips email newsletter today!