Robots and your Website – Google’s robots.txt File Generator

We’ve all seen the movies where the robots are coming for us, including classics such as The Terminator and The Matrix. What people may not know is that they already came for us – and got all of our information… In fact, the most widely used website in the world is built upon one of these robots: The GoogleBot.

Indeed, not all robots are here to subjugate humanity and turn us into subservient slaves. They are actually quite helpful, indexing web sites on popular search engines so that visitors may come and indulge in the pages of our websites. Without these robots, most of the information revolution we’ve seen in the past 20 years would not have been possible.

But what if you have some information on your website you’d rather not have the whole world take a look at? Perhaps a baby picture from when you were small that you only share with family friends, internal pages that you may want to keep out of the search results page from a business perspective. There are many valid reasons for “banning” the bots from certain pages, and there are some good ways to do this.

One answer is a robots.txt file. Essentially this is a text file (which can be written in any text editor) that issues commands to robots to visit only the portions of a website that you allow. The basic syntax is fairly simple, and a good overview is available here. We want to be very careful when employing these files, however, and make absolutely sure that we know what effects our actions will have. For this reasons, many webmasters are uncomfortable with editing this themselves, as one small mistake could render your site entirely invisible (or entirely visible) to any robot.

Luckily, Google now offers a tool that will automatically generate a robots.txt file for you, saving some time and perhaps avoiding an unintentional disaster.

Using this tool can help you control the pages of your website, and we can make sure our robots keep coming back on our terms, without terminating us.

Need help with your technical SEO issues? Contact us today.

Corey Koberg

Corey Koberg is a Founder and co-CEO at Cardinal Path where he leads the analysis, data science, media, and product development teams. He is a well-known speaker, having keynoted and led sessions on advertising, analytics, and optimization at conferences and events across the globe. Over the last decade he has taught thousands on the topics of online marketing measurement, statistical analysis, and optimization. He is the author of Display Advertising: An Hour A Day (Wiley, 2012), Google Analytics Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011) and technical editor of several works, among them Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (Wiley, 2010), Google AdWords Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011), and Google Website Optimizer Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2010) As a Principal, he has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, such as Google, Chevron, Intel, NBC, Papa John’s, National Geographic, Time Warner, Universal Music, DeVry University, and others, to improve the effectiveness of their online presence through results-oriented, data-driven optimization. Corey holds a degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois and has been involved in Internet-related engineering and consulting for over 15 years, beginning his career in the NCSA labs that developed the world’s first web browser. Corey is a proud husband and father of three children and enjoys sailboat racing, downhill skiing, and photography. He is involved on a volunteer basis with the University of Illinois and the local Emergency Response Team.