How to Optimize Your WordPress Robots.txt for SEO

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What is robots.txt file?
Robots.txt is a text file that website owners can create to tell search engine bots how to crawl and index pages on their site.
It is typically stored in the root directory, also known as the main folder, of your website. The basic format for a robots.txt file looks like this:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Sitemap: example.com/si...
In the above robots.txt example, we have allowed search engines to crawl and index files in our WordPress uploads folder.
After that, we have disallowed search bots from crawling and indexing plugins and WordPress admin folders.
Lastly, we have provided the URL of our XML sitemap.
Do You Need a Robots.txt File for Your WordPress Site?
If you don’t have a robots.txt file, then search engines will still crawl and index your website. However, you will not be able to tell search engines which pages or folders they should not crawl.
This will not have much of an impact when you’re first starting a blog and do not have a lot of content.
However as your website grows and you have a lot of content, then you would likely want to have better control over how your website is crawled and indexed.
Here is why.
Search bots have a crawl quota for each website.
This means that they crawl a certain number of pages during a crawl session. If they don’t finish crawling all pages on your site, then they will come back and resume crawl in the next session.
This can slow down your website indexing rate.
You can fix this by disallowing search bots from attempting to crawl unnecessary pages like your WordPress admin pages, plugin files, and themes folder.
By disallowing unnecessary pages, you save your crawl quota. This helps search engines crawl even more pages on your site and index them as quickly as possible.
Another good reason to use robots.txt file is when you want to stop search engines from indexing a post or page on your website.
It is not the safest way to hide content from the general public, but it will help you prevent them from appearing in search results.