448-Do You Need a robots.txt File?  (A Brief Overview of .htaccess vs. robots.txt)

If you wish to delve into SEO, you may want to learn more about coding or the development aspect of the activity. Therefore, it helps to know how to send messages to the spiders about the files you want them to crawl.

Internal Access and External Access and SEO

SEO professionals in the know are well acquainted with .htaccess vs. robots.txt when they are configuring a site for SEO. Definitively, .htaccess refers to internal access, robots.txt oversees external access. Therefore, using .htaccess tells a server how to manage page and file names and URLs and clarifies access to the resources. 

The robots.txt controls external access, as it directs the search engines and web tools to the pages or sections they should read or index. Humans can still browse or read what they want. 

Basically a robots.txt represents a file that directs the spiders of a search engine to avoid specific web pages or sections. Most of the major search engines honor robots.txt implementations. However, Google can locate and index key web pages extremely well without the use of robot.txt.

When to Use Robot.txt for Your Website

You want to use robot.txt when:

• You want certain public pages blocked from search engine spiders and bots. For instance, you may not want users landing on a login page.
• You find it difficult to get all your web pages indexed. In this case, you would use robots.txt to block nonessential pages to prevent a crawl budget issue.
• You want to avoid indexing of resources. While meta directives work as well as robots.txt for keeping pages from getting indexed, it is better to use robots.txt for multimedia resources, such as images and PDFs.

If you are wondering where you stand with respect to website use and you want to prevent people from landing on the wrong page, robots.txt can serve your purposes. 

When .htaccess Is Normally Employed

When you differentiate .htaccess vs. robots,txt use, .htaccess is employed when a content provider needs to configure changes to a server per a directory but cannot gain root access on a server system.

As a result, how and when you configure your web pages and how they are indexed correlate with the use of .htaccess and robots.txt. Knowing the reasons they should be used can help you design a better website. 

What do you think about the use of these files? Have you had to use them for your own platform? If not, maybe you can use them now or they might be beneficial to employ.