Technical SEO Architecture
Technical SEO is the foundation upon which all other search marketing efforts are built. Without clear directives for search engine bots, your content may never be properly indexed, regardless of its quality.
The Role of Robots.txt
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. To keep a web page out of Google, you should use noindex directives or password-protect your page.
XML Sitemaps: The Roadmap
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.
Best Practices
- User-agent: *: Apply rules to all web robots.
- Disallow Sensitive Paths: Keep search engines away from
/cgi-bin/,/tmp/, or personal folders. - Update Frequently: Regenerate your sitemap whenever you add new high-value content.