The Robots.txt file is an on-page SEO factor that doesn’t get enough attention. Not everyone understands how important it is. The Robots.txt file is like an access control system that tells the crawler bots which pages need to be crawled and which don’t. It is a set of rules for your website that web bots read before they try to crawl through your site.

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 environment 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.

Either read this blog or simply Hire Dedicated Drupal developers from us and let them manage your development.

TABLE OF CONTENT

How does Robots.txt help SEO, though?

  • Okay, Robots. Some pages can’t be crawled by bots because of Txt files. But why wouldn’t you want all of your files and pages to be 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 Google bot, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) visit your site in a certain amount of time. If you have too many pages to crawl, you might not get found as 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.
  • Get your package of Drupal SEO services now

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. 

Step 1: Put the Drupal 9 RobotsTxt Module in place.

The use of composer: 

composer require ‘drupal/robotstxt:^1.4

Step 2 is to turn on the gadget.

Go to Home > Administration > Extend (/admin/modules) and turn on the RobotsTxt module.

Robots.txt

Source: Specbee

Robots.txt file is made.

Step 3: Get rid of the old 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.

Implement Robot.txt In Drupal 9

Source: Specbee

Take out the file Robots.txt

Step 4: Set up.

Go to Home > Administration > Configuration > Search and information > RobotsTxt (/admin/config/search/robotstxt), where you can make changes to the “Contents of robots.txt” area. You should save the settings.

Implement Robot.txt In Drupal 9

Source: Specbee

What’s in Robots.txt?

Step 5: Check

Please go to https://yoursitename.com/robots.txt to check if your changes worked.

Implement Robot.txt In Drupal 9

Source: Specbee

Look at the Robots.txt file

The RobotTxt API

You can use the RobotsTxt API to set up a shared list of directives for all of the sites in your multisite setup. Hook_robotstxt() is the only hook in the package. With the hook, you can add more instructions to the code. 

/**

* Add 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’,

 ];

}

Source: Specbee

The RobotsTxt module in Drupal is just one of many useful SEO modules in Drupal that can help you improve your SEO. Putting the robots to use.Txt file is not required, but it is a great tool to have if you want to get more people to see your website. Need professional Drupal SEO services for your next project? Or do you just want to know more about this module? We really want to talk to you!

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. 

Contact us now!

This blog is inspired by <https://www.specbee.com/blogs/why-you-need-RobotsTxt-module-for-Drupal-SEO>