The robots.txt file is a protocol established by webmasters in 1994 in order to indicate to search engine bots, the pages and directories of a website that should not be accessed by bots. And, as a result, some of the most linked-to domains have been affected adversely as the robots.txt file has been misused t disallow bot access to some of the most important pages in those domains.
There are, however, ways to sort out the mess that is created as a result of blocking pages with enormous link-juice potential. This article highlights how the robots.txt blocked files are treated by search engines.
Limited Listings in Google SERPs
The good bots that adhere to the robots.txt file protocol follow the instructions of the robots.txt file. These bots will not index the contents of the page, as instructed in the file, but will usually include the page in their listings. These pages are limited in search engine listings, and you may see only the Title Tag and the website URL in most cases.
Limiting In-bound Link Juice
If you are using the robots.txt to block search engine indexing of your pages, then you must know that not only is the practice ineffective, but also, in most cases, completely cuts off your inbound link flow. As the contents of a page include links that are being followed from the web-sphere, the use of the robots.txt file will instruct the search engines to ignore that content and, therefore, the search engine will not index the contents on the page. As a result, any, and all inbound links to that page will not be able to flow to other pages.
This particular instance will not allow you to utilize the inbound link value to it’s full potential. And this directly effects the value that these inbound links create for the rest of your website’s internal pages.
What To Do?
To increase inbound link value to your internal pages, look up the protocol and study it thoroughly.
If you see a possible misuse of the robots.txt file, then you need to identify the pages that will need to be removed from this protocol based on your search engine research. You can then use the noindex meta tag ONLY to pages that you want excluded from the search engine index. If you have pages on your website that do not exist anymore, as well as pages that were excluded in the protocol, then use the 301 redirect. Use the canonical tag for page duplication if these pages were previously excluded by the robots.txt file.
ABSEM-SEO.com is an SEO News Aggregation site providing SEO Tips written by SEO Consultants & SEO Experts.
