Why should you guide search engine robots?

Important and valuable pages will be crawled every time Google visits your website if you guide the bot. Other pages such as the 'terms and conditions' page on your website are not important for search engine rankings.

Search engine robots can ignore these pages that do not need to be ranked. Indexing time that is spend on these pages should be spent on the more important pages of your site.

There are several different ways to guide Googlebot to the right pages:

1. Use a good robots.txt file and the the meta noindex tag

Robots.txt is the name of a text file that is available at www.your-domain.com/robots.txt. It tells search engines which parts of your website should be accessible.

You should set disallow rules for all file types, folders and pages that you do not want to be indexed.  Search engine robots check the robots.txt file before indexing the pages on a website.

A good robots.txt file makes sure that unimportant pages aren't indexed. Examples can be found here.

The meta noindex tag is another way to exclude individual pages from the index. In general, you do not need this tag if you have a good robots.txt file.

2. Make sure that all of your links work

Search engine bots follow the links they find on your web pages. Broken links are a sign of low quality sites. You don't want Googlebot to waste time on crawling links to non-existing pages on your site. You can check the links on your site with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler.

3. Improve your website structure

A good website structure with clearly categorized page content increases the likelihood that Googlebot and other search engine bots will find the important pages of your site.

The most important pages of your site should be available with a few mouse clicks. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler shows you how many clicks are needed to reach the pages on your site.

If you do the things above, Google will index the right pages of your site. The number of indexed pages is not as important as the quality of the indexed pages. If the right web pages can be found for the right keywords, you will get many more sales.

The tools in our web-based website promotion tool SEOprofiler help you to achieve this goal. If you haven't done it yet, try SEOprofiler now.

Article by Axandra
SEO software