The robots.txt file is an on-page SEO factor that doesn’t get enough attention. Not everyone understands how important it is. The robot.txt in Drupal 9 file web crawlers on which pages to access and which to avoid. A robots.txt file is a set of rules that web crawlers read before accessing your website.
There are a lot of great Drupal SEO plugins in versions 9 and 8 that make our jobs easier and help us rank higher in SEO. And the RobotTxt gadget is one of them. In Drupal 9 and 8, the RobotsTxt module is a useful tool that makes it easy to handle the Robots.Txt file in a Drupal enviro
nment with multiple sites. Through the UI, you can make and change robots.txt files for each site in real-time. Let’s find out more about this module and how to use it in Drupal 9.
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How Does Robots.txt Help SEO, Though?
- Okay, robots. Some pages cannot be crawled by bots due to text file restrictions. But why would you want to prevent all of your files and pages from being crawled? Why do you need any kind of limits at all? Well, in this case, it’s not always true that more is better.
- If you don’t have a robots.txt file, web spiders can look at all of your pages, parts, and files. This takes up your crawl budget, which is a real thing. This can hurt your SEO.
- A crawl budget is the number of times web spiders (like Googlebot, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) visit your site in a certain amount of time. If your website contains too many pages, search engines might not index them quickly. Not only that, but you might also miss indexing the important pages!
- Your pages don’t all have to be crawled. For instance, you wouldn’t want Google to crawl your development/staging environment web pages or your internal login pages.
- You might want to stop crawlers from going through images, videos, and other media items.
- If you have a lot of pages with duplicate information, it’s better to add them to the Robots.Txt file than to use canonical links on each page.
How To Put The RobotsTxt Module In Drupal 9 and Use It
When you want to make a Robot on the fly, the RobotsTxt Drupal 9 plugin is great. When you run multiple sites from the same script (called a “multisite environment”), you need a robots.txt file for each site.
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Step 1: Install the RobotsTxt Module
Use Composer to install the module:
composer require drupal/robotstxt:^1.6
Step 2 Enable the Module
Home > Administration > Extend
Step 3: Remove the Default robots.txt File
Make sure to delete or rename the robots.txt file in the root of your Drupal installation once the module is loaded so that this module can show its robots.txt file(s). If not, the module won’t be able to catch calls for the path /robots.txt.
Step 4: Configure the robots.txt File
Home > Administration > Configuration > Search and Metadata > RobotsTxt
Step 5: Verify the Configuration
Please go to https://appicsoftwares.com/robots.txt to check if your changes worked.
The RobotTxt API
The RobotsTxt module in Drupal 9 offers an API that allows developers to programmatically add directives to the robots.txt file, which is particularly beneficial in a multisite environment. By implementing the hook_robotstxt(), you can define shared directives across multiple sites without manually editing each site’s robots.txt file.
//**
* Adds additional lines to the site’s robots.txt file.
*
* @return array
* An array of strings to add to the robots.txt.
*/
function hook_robotstxt() {
return [
‘Disallow: /foo’,
‘Disallow: /bar’,
];
}
In this example, the directives ‘Disallow: /foo’ and ‘Disallow: /bar’ prevent search engines from crawling the specified paths. The RobotsTxt module dynamically appends these directives to the robots.txt file.
Conclusion
Setting up a robots.txt file in Drupal 9 is easy, and it gives you control over how search engine crawlers can view the content of your website. By following the steps in this guide, you can make a robots.txt file, set it up to fit your needs, and make sure that search engines crawl and
scan your website the way you want them to.
Remember that the way your robots.txt file is set up is important for both SEO and security. Be careful about what you don’t let on your website because it can affect how well it does in search engines and how visible it is. As your website changes, you should check and update your robots.txt file to make sure it still fits with your SEO strategy and goals.
By using Drupal 9’s robots.txt file well and keeping it up to date, you can find the right mix between giving people access to valuable content and keeping search engine crawlers away from sensitive or unnecessary parts of your website.
Now, at the end of this post, we hope you were able to learn about the Drupal plugins that your ecommerce store must have. Appic Softwares, on the other hand, is a good place to look if you need a Drupal development company.
