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What is Robots.txt File? What are the Different types of bots or Web Crawlers?

Robots.txt is a standard text file is used for websites or web applications to communicate with web crawlers (bots). It is used for the purpose of web indexing or spidering. It will help the website that ranks as highly as possible by the search engines.

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Robots

1. What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a standard text file that is used for websites or web applications to communicate with web crawlers (bots). It is used for web indexing or spidering. It will help the site that ranks as highly as possible by the search engines.

The robots.txt file is an integral part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) or Robots Exclusion Standard, a robot exclusion standard that regulates how robots will crawl the web pages, index, and serve that web content up to users.

Web Crawlers

Web Crawlers are also known as Web Spiders, Web Robots, WWW Robots, Web Scrapers, Web Wanderers, Bots, Internet Bots, Spiders, user-agents, Browsers. One of the most preferred Web Crawler is Googlebot. This Web Crawlers are simply called as Bots.

The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes, and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. More than half of all web traffic is made up of bots.

Many popular programming languages are used to created web robots. The Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages all have libraries available for creating web robots. Pywikipedia (Python Wikipedia bot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating web robots.

Examples of programming languages based open-source Web Crawlers are

  • Apache Nutch (Java)
  • PHP-Crawler (PHP)
  • HTTrack (C-lang)
  • Heritrix (Java)
  • Octoparse (MS.NET and C#)
  • Xapian (C++)
  • Scrappy (Python)
  • Sphinx (C++)

2. Different Types of Bots

a) Social bots

Social Bots have a set of algorithms that will take the repetitive set of instructions in order to establish a service or connection works among social networking users.

b) Commercial Bots

The Commercial Bot algorithms have set off instructions in order to deal with automated trading functions, Auction websites, and eCommerce websites, etc.

c) Malicious (spam) Bots

The Malicious Bot algorithms have instructions to operate an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by a botnet. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links. More than 94.2% of websites have experienced a bot attack.

d) Helpful Bots

The bots will helpful for all customers and companies and make Communication over all the Internet without having to communicate with a person. for example, e-mails, chatbots, and reminders, etc.

Different Types of Bots

3. List of Web Crawlers or User-agents

List of Top Good Bots or Crawlers or User-agents

[php]
Googlebot
Googlebot-Image/1.0
Googlebot-News
Googlebot-Video/1.0
Googlebot-Mobile
Mediapartners-Google
AdsBot-Google
AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps
Google Mobile Adsense
Google Plus Share
Google Feedfetcher
Bingbot
Bingbot Mobile
msnbot
msnbot-media
Baiduspider
Sogou Spider
[/php]
[php]
YandexBot
Yandex
Slurp
rogerbot
ahrefsbot
mj12bot
DuckDuckBot
facebot
Facebook External Hit
Teoma
Applebot
Swiftbot
Twitterbot
ia_archiver
Exabot
Soso Spider
[/php]

List of Top Bad Bots or Crawlers or User-agents

[php]
dotbot
Teleport
EmailCollector
EmailSiphon
WebZIP
Web Downloader
WebCopier
HTTrack Website Copier/3.x
Leech
WebSnake
[/php]
[php]
BlackWidow
asterias
BackDoorBot/1.0
Black Hole
CherryPicker
Crescent
TightTwatBot
Crescent Internet ToolPak HTTP OLE Control v.1.0
WebmasterWorldForumBot
adidxbot
[/php]
[php]
Nutch
EmailWolf
CheeseBot
NetAnts
httplib
Foobot
SpankBot
humanlinks
PerMan
sootle
Xombot
[/php]

Note:- If you need more names of Bad Bots or Crawlers or User-agents with examples in the TwinzTech Robots.txt File.

4. Basic format of robots.txt

[php]
User-agent: [user-agent name]
Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]
[/php]

The above two lines are considered as a complete robots.txt file. one robots file can contain multiple lines of user agents names and directives (i.e., allows, disallows, crawl-delays, and sitemaps, etc.)

It has multiple sets of lines of user agent’s names and directives, which are separated by a line break for an example in the below screenshot.

user-agent are separated by a line break and its Comment

Use # symbol to give single line comments in robots.txt file.

5. Basic robots.txt examples

Here are some regular robots.txt Configuration explained in detail below.

Allow full access

[php]
User-agent: *
Disallow:

OR

User-agent: *
Allow: /
[/php]

Block all access

[php]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
[/php]

Block one folder

[php]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/
[/php]

Block one file or page

[php]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page-name.html/
[/php]

6. How to create a robots.txt file

Robots files are in text format we can save as text (.txt) Formats like robots.txt in editors or environments. See the example in the below screenshot.

robots file save as in .txt formats

7. Where we can place or find the robots.txt file

The website owner wishes to give instructions to web robots. They place a text file called robots.txt in the root directory of the webserver. (e.g., https://www.twinztech.com/robots.txt)

This text file contains the instructions in a specific format (see examples below). Robots that choose to follow the instructions try to fetch this file and read the instructions before fetching any other file from the website. If this File doesn’t exist, web robots assume that the web owner wishes to provide no specific instructions and crawl the entire site.

8. How to check my website robots.txt on the web browser

Go to web browsers and enter the domain name in the address bar of the browser and add forward slash like /robots.txt and enter and see the file details (https://www.twinztech.com/robots.txt). See the example in the below screenshot.

check website robots.txt on the web browser

9. Where we can submit a robots.txt on Google Webmasters (search console)

Follow the below example screenshots and submit the robots.txt on webmasters (search console).

1. Add a new site property on search console-like as below screenshot (if you have a property on search console leave the first point and move to second).

submiting robots.txt on google search console

2. Click your site property and see the new options on screen and select the crawl options on the left side is as shown in the below screenshot.

submiting robots.txt on google search console

3. Click the robots.txt tester option in crawl options is as shown in the below screenshot.

submiting robots.txt on google search console

4. After clicking the robots.txt tester option in crawl options, we can see the new options on screen and click the submit button is as shown in the below screenshot.

submiting robots.txt on google search console

10. Examples of how to block specific web crawler from a specific page/folder

[php]
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /example-page/
Disallow: /example-subfolder-name/
[/php]

The above syntax tells only Bing crawler (user-agent name Bingbot) not to crawl the page that contains the URL string https://www.example.com/example-page/ and not to crawl any pages that contain the URL string https://www.example.com/example-subfolder-name/.

11. How to allow and disallow a specific web crawler in robots.txt

[php]
# Allowed User Agents
User-agent: rogerbot
Allow: /
[/php]

The above syntax tells to Allow the user-agent name called rogerbot for crawling/reading the pages on the website.

[php]
# Disallowed User Agents
User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /
[/php]

The above syntax tells to Disallow the user-agent name called dot bot for not crawling/reading the pages on the website.

12. How To Block Unwanted Bots From a Website By Using robots.txt File

Due to security we can avoid or block unwanted bots using the robots.txt file. The List of unwanted bots is blocking by the help of robots.txt File.

[php]
# Disallowed User Agents

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: HTTrack Website Copier/3.x
Disallow: /

User-agent: Teleport
Disallow: /

User-agent: EmailCollector
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZIP
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebCopier
Disallow: /

User-agent: Leech
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebSnake
[/php]

The above syntax tells to Disallow the unwanted bots or user-agents names for not crawling/reading the pages on the website.

See the below screenshot with examples

Disallow the unwanted bots

13. How to add Crawl-Delay in robots.txt file

In the robots.txt file, we can set Crawl-Delay for specific or all bots or user-agents

[php]
User-agent: Baiduspider
Crawl-delay: 6
[/php]

The above syntax tells Baiduspider should wait for 6 MSC before crawling each page.

[php]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 6
[/php]

The above syntax tells all user-agents should wait for 6 MSC before crawling each page.

14. How to add multiple sitemaps in robots.txt file

The examples of adding multiple sitemaps in the robots.txt file are

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/page-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/category-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/post_tag-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/author-sitemap.xml

The above syntax tells us to call out multiple sitemaps in the robots.txt File.

15. Technical syntax of robots.txt

There are five most common terms come across in a robots file. The syntax of robots.txt files includes:

User-agent: The command specifies the name of a web crawler or user-agents.

Disallow: The command giving crawl instructions (usually a search engines) to tell a user-agent not to crawl the page or URL. Only one “Disallow:” line is allowed for each URL.

Allow: The command giving crawl instructions (usually a search engines) to tell a user-agent to crawl the page or URL. It is only applicable for Googlebot.

Crawl-delay: The command should tell how many milliseconds a crawler (usually a search engines) should wait before loading and crawling page content.

Note: that Googlebot does not acknowledge this command, but crawl rate can be set in Google Search Console.

Sitemap: The command is Used to call out the location of any XML sitemaps associated with this URL.

Note: This command is only supported by Google, Ask, Bing, and Yahoo search engines.

robots.txt

Here we can see the Robots.txt Specifications.

Also Read : How to Flush the Rewrite URL’s or permalinks in WordPress Dashboard?

16. Pattern-matching in robots.txt file

All search engines support regular expressions that can be used to identify pages or subfolders that an SEO wants excluded.

With the help of Pattern-matching in the robots.txt File, we can control the bots by the two characters are the asterisk (*) and the dollar sign ($).

1. An asterisk (*) is a wildcard that represents the sequence of characters.
2. Dollar Sign ($) is a Regex symbol that must match at the end of the URL/line.

17. Why is robots.txt file important?

Search Engines crawls robots.txt File first, and next to your website, Search Engines will look at your robots.txt File as instructions on where they are allowed to crawl or visit and index or save on the search engine results.

Robots.txt files are very useful and play an important role in the search engine results; If you want search engines to ignore or disallow any duplicate pages or content on your website do with the help of robots.txt File.

Helpful Resources:

1. What is the Difference Between Absolute and Relative URLs?

2. 16 Best Free SEO WordPress plugins for your Blogs & websites

3. What is Canonicalization? and Cross-Domain Content Duplication

4. What is On-Site (On-Page) and Off-Site (Off-Page) SEO?

5. What is HTTPS or HTTP Secure?

We are an Instructor, Modern Full Stack Web Application Developers, Freelancers, Tech Bloggers, and Technical SEO Experts. We deliver a rich set of software applications for your business needs.

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Digital Marketing

How SEO Proxies Can Help to Promote Your Website

SEO proxies are an invaluable tool for website promotion and can provide many advantages to businesses seeking to improve their online presence.

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Importance of Proxies Server

SEO proxies can be a powerful tool for improving your website’s visibility and helping you reach a wider audience. By using proxies, you can effectively manage your search engine optimization efforts without having to worry about your IP address being blocked or restricted by certain websites.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the ways in which SEO proxies can help you promote your website and improve its rankings on search engine results pages. We’ll also look at some of the common challenges associated with using proxies and how to address them. So, if you’re looking to give your website a boost, read on for the details!

1. What Is an SEO proxy?

An SEO proxy is a dedicated server or computer program that enables users to access search engines and websites without revealing their actual IP address. With an SEO proxy, website owners and marketers can conduct market research, track advertising campaigns, and analyze competitor websites without getting blocked or banned by search engines.

By routing internet traffic through different IP addresses and geographical locations, an SEO proxy essentially makes it virtually impossible for search engines and websites to identify and block user activity. Moreover, SEO proxies come with advanced settings and protocols that help safeguard the user’s identity and privacy, ensuring a safe and uninterrupted browsing experience.

Whether you’re a small business, an established website owner, or a digital marketing agency, an SEO proxy can help you optimize your online strategies and achieve long-term success.

2. How Do SEO Proxies Work?

SEO proxies are a powerful tool for those who want to improve their website’s search engine ranking. These proxies work by allowing users to conduct research on search engines without revealing their location or IP address. Through SEO proxies, users can monitor their website’s rankings, track the performance of their competitors, and get an edge over them.

This is because these proxies make it possible to access a variety of search engine results pages (SERP) from different locations, allowing users to get accurate data on their website’s performance in different markets. SEO proxies are an important tool in any digital marketer’s arsenal and can help businesses stay ahead of the competition.

3. Why Are SEO Proxies Important for Website Promotion?

In today’s digital world, website promotion plays a crucial role in determining the success of a business. With so many companies vying for online visibility, it’s important to have an edge. That’s where SEO proxies come in. By using proxies, website owners can automate the process of collecting valuable data and analyzing their competition.

This allows for more informed decision-making when it comes to optimizing their website for search engines. Netnut, a leading provider of premium residential proxies, offers a reliable solution for businesses seeking to improve their SEO strategy.

Their proxies offer high-speed connections and low failure rates, ensuring that website owners have access to accurate and up-to-date information. In short, using SEO proxies can be the difference between being lost in the noise of the internet and standing out as a successful online business.

Importance of Proxies For Business

4. Benefits of Using SEO Proxies

Increased Website Traffic

Website traffic is a crucial component of any successful online presence, and the benefits of using SEO proxies cannot be overstated. By utilizing these specialized tools, businesses and individuals can increase their website traffic through more accurate and effective data gathering.

This allows for improved targeting, optimization, and overall performance. With the right SEO proxy, valuable insights into organic search results, keyword rankings, and other crucial metrics can be gleaned with ease.

This translates to increased engagement and conversions from potential customers. Investing in SEO proxies is a smart choice for anyone looking to boost their online traffic and improve their performance in today’s competitive digital landscape.

Improved Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to any business or website looking to increase visibility and traffic. One crucial aspect of SEO is utilizing SEO proxies, which can provide many benefits for improving search engine rankings.

A reliable SEO proxy allows businesses to leverage a diverse range of IP addresses while conducting keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink monitoring. This ability to access different IP addresses makes it easier to avoid detection by search engines, which can protect businesses from penalties and keep their SEO strategies on track.

Furthermore, SEO proxies provide businesses with the opportunity to analyze the competition and optimize their own website more effectively. By using SEO proxies, businesses can gain a competitive edge in the online world, boost online visibility, and improve search engine rankings.

Increased Brand Awareness

As businesses continue to evolve and expand their online presence, the significance of search engine optimization (SEO) cannot be ignored. The use of SEO proxies has proven to be an effective method for boosting brand awareness and improving your SEO rankings.

These proxies offer a secure and anonymous way to access search engines and gather valuable data without being blocked or banned. In addition, using a diverse range of private proxies can provide you with a competitive advantage over your competitors.

By utilizing SEO proxies, you can gain access to local search queries and improve your targeting efforts, ultimately leading to a greater online presence and increased brand awareness.

VPN Proxy Services

Enhanced Security

With the ever-growing number of online businesses, SEO has become a key element in ensuring organic traffic to a website. However, achieving success in SEO requires more than just targeting the right keywords.

With the use of SEO proxies, businesses gain access to a wide range of IP addresses, allowing them to bypass restrictions and gain valuable insights into their competitors’ marketing tactics. But beyond the advantages of scraping search engines and protecting sensitive data, SEO proxies also enhance security.

By concealing their real IP addresses and using a rotation system, businesses can thwart hackers and protect themselves from cyber-attacks. With the benefits of using SEO proxies, businesses can focus on improving their website’s ranking without worrying about data breaches.

5. How to Enhance SEO with Live Proxies

Live Proxies provide significant advantages for SEO efforts, making them an essential tool for digital marketers and SEO professionals. Their extensive network of over 10 million IPs, which includes rotating residential, static residential, and mobile proxies, is ideal for comprehensive and anonymous web scraping. This capability is vital for gathering precise SEO data such as keyword rankings, competitor analysis, and search engine results page (SERP) monitoring without risking IP bans or blocks.

Furthermore, the high-quality IPs offered by Live Proxies ensure dependable access to geographically specific search results, enabling SEO experts to fine-tune their strategies for targeted audiences in various regions such as the US, CA, UK, and RL.

The availability of different IP types, including mobile IPs, offers a distinct advantage, particularly in mobile SEO, which is increasingly crucial given the rising importance of mobile search in Google’s rankings. Live Proxies are versatile, catering to the needs of both individual SEO consultants and large SEO agencies, providing scalability and customizable plans to suit various requirements.

Their reliability in offering uninterrupted and real-time connectivity positions Live Proxies as an indispensable asset in executing and elevating SEO campaigns, ultimately enhancing search engine visibility and effectiveness.

6. Factors to Consider When Choosing an SEO Proxy

An SEO proxy is an essential tool for any digital marketer looking to improve their search engine optimization efforts. Choosing the right proxy can be challenging, as there are several factors to consider. In this section, we will discuss some of the most important factors to keep in mind when selecting an SEO proxy.

Location

The location of the proxy server is an important factor to consider when choosing an SEO proxy. The closer the proxy is to your target audience, the faster it will be able to load web pages. This is particularly important if you are targeting a specific geographical location. For example, if you are targeting users in the United States, you should choose a proxy that has servers located in the US.

Speed

Speed is another critical factor to consider when selecting an SEO proxy. A fast proxy will allow you to scrape data quickly and efficiently, which is essential for successful SEO campaigns. Look for proxies with low latency and high bandwidth to ensure fast performance.

Security

Security is an essential consideration when selecting an SEO proxy. Ensure that the proxy you choose offers encryption and other security features to protect your data from hackers and other online threats. Look for proxies with built-in security protocols such as SSL or HTTPS.

Reliability

Reliability is crucial when choosing an SEO proxy. The last thing you want is for your proxy to go down in the middle of a critical SEO campaign. Look for proxies with high uptime guarantees and 24/7 customer support in case anything goes wrong.

Price

Finally, price is always a consideration when selecting an SEO proxy. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest option available, remember that you get what you pay for. Look for proxies that offer a good balance of features, reliability, and affordability. Consider the cost of the proxy against the potential ROI of your SEO efforts to determine the best value for your business.

In Conclusion

SEO proxies are an invaluable tool for website promotion and can provide many advantages to businesses seeking to improve their online presence. With the help of these specialized servers, users can access search engines from multiple locations without revealing their true IP address.

This allows them to collect valuable data, monitor competitors, and optimize their SEO strategies with ease. SEO proxies also provide enhanced security, improved search engine rankings, increased website traffic, and brand awareness

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