All the activities and optimization actions that we do on the site should be indexed by Google bots in order to determine its effect on the site ranking and to be ranked better in the results. One of the technical things (SEO) that is used to optimize the index of site pages is to use the robots.txt file and robots metatag.
What is Robots.txt file ?
If a robot wants to index a page from a website, it first sees robots.txt and follows its instructions. The robots.txt file guides search bots on how to crawl different pages of your website.
What is Robots meta tag ?
This tag in HTML acts like a Robots.txt file. It allows you to control search engines to crawl the pages of your website.
What is the difference between them?
- The robots.txt file is a file at www.example.com/robots.txt. But there are also meta tag robots in the form of tags before the head, as in the example below:
<head>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
</head>
2. With a robots.txt command you can block many pages for bots and search engines. But if you want to do the same thing with the robots meta tag, you have to include the meta tag in each of those pages.
3. In the robots.txt file, you can introduce the sitemap site to bots and search engines, but not with meta tags.
4.The robots.txt file also takes precedence over the robots meta tag for search engines. but robots meta tag commands are also more flexible than robots.txt files.
If you want to use both methods, note that Google’s robot does not index content blocked by robots.txt. But if it finds a link to blocked content elsewhere on the web, it will show it in Google search results. There are different ways to solve this problem, but you can easily use the robots meta tag with the noindex command.
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