subject: 3 Tips For Fully Utilizing Your Robots Txt File [print this page] When it comes to administering the back-end part of your website, especially if this is a sales site that you are going to use to promote a product to make money, one of the important items that should be included in your server files and in the meta data of your web pages is called the "robots.txt" file. Depending on the type of website you have and the purpose that it serves for you, the information that you include in your robots file is of varying importance. When you are first setting up your website, this is only something that you need to do once put it can have important benefits months and years into the future.
The purpose of the "robots.txt" file is to instruct search engine web bots or spiders as to which content should be indexed and which content should be avoided. There are three important tips that can help you to gain the maximum benefits from using this file in the right way on your server.
Protect Your Files, Software, And Documents
Many online businesses have a business model based on the digital delivery of a product, whether that product is a piece of software or an ebook that contains certain important information that the buyer needs. Software piracy is a major concern for this type of business model, and unfortunately with an ebook product it is much easier to damage your business because your documents can be stored in a search engine quite easily. By instructing web bots not to catalog certain material you can help to make sure that these files or software remain confidential.
Keep Others From Infringing Your Copyrighted Material
Many types of websites such as a photography website, a stock photo marketplace, a premium desktop wallpaper site or any other type of site that is largely graphics-intensive might have a large images folder which you would not want to be stored in the memory of any search engines. You may also have articles or documents that you sell to provide a solution to a given problem, or maybe you simply do not want other authors out there to copy your articles word-for-word. By including a statement in your "robots.txt" file that says "Disallow: /folder/" where you insert the name of the folder where your material is stored you can prevent search engine spiders from indexing any of this content.
Prevent Web Bots From Utilizing Excessive Bandwidth
If you have a large website then there is a chance that your images folder could have as many as thousands of different images which could take up gigabytes of space. If a search engine spider stumbles upon this folder it could potentially lead to an unwanted increase in server bandwidth. Taking steps to prevent this from happening by instructing web bots to ignore your images folder or other folders containing large files could make sure that you do not receive higher website hosting invoices due to increased bandwidth.
It is important to remember that while most search engine spiders are programmed to honor the data that is presented in the robots file, do not fully assume that all of the files and archives on your site will never be indexed or copied simply because this file says that they shouldn't be. A computer programmer that does not have your best interest at heart can program a web bot to simply store all information and files it finds into its own cache memory, and if you are running a website where you sell a digital product then this could potentially harm your business because once your documents are copied they can then be distributed or catalogued in the search engines.
by: Ricky Weber
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