Are you a real estate agent trying to get more leads from your website? Perhaps, you’ve already started working on SEO to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, have you ever considered creating a robots.txt file to improve your website’s crawlability or restrict search engine bots from accessing certain things? This file directs the spiders which pages on your site to crawl and which to avoid. In this article, we’ll explain why your real estate website needs a robots.txt file, how to create one, and the best practices to follow.
Does Your Real Estate Website Need a Robots.txt File?
The answer is a Yes! By adding a robots.txt file to your website, you can prevent search engines from crawling unimportant pages and directories, thus focusing on indexing pages that will benefit your SEO efforts. This file has become more crucial today as search engines are getting smarter at identifying and ignoring irrelevant pages while crawling websites.
How to Create a Robots.txt File?
Creating a robots.txt file is easy and can be done with a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. Here’s how to create a standard robots.txt file:
- Open your text editor.
- Type User-agent:. This line specifies which search engine bot you want to give instructions.
- Write the Allow or Disallow command to tell the bot which pages to index and which to exclude. For example, to disallow the entire site, write Disallow: / or to allow only a specific directory, write Allow: /directory/.
- Add a Sitemap line if you want to give search engines the path to your sitemap file.
- Save the file in your root directory of your website.
Best Practices for Creating Robots.txt Files
Although creating a robots.txt file is easy, you need to be careful when writing the instructions. Here are some best practices to ensure your file doesn’t hinder your website’s SEO efforts:
- Avoid using wildcard characters as much as possible as they can create confusion and block important pages.
How to Make Sure Important Webpages are Not Blocked by Robots.txt Accidently Using Google Console
Mistakes can happen, and accidentally blocking your site’s critical pages can be disastrous for your search engine rankings. Luckily, the Google Search Console can help you identify and resolve any crawl errors on your website.
Here’s how:
- Open the Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) and sign in.
- From the dashboard, click on the “Coverage” tab.
- Check the “Excluded” section for any blocked URLs.
- Click on the errors to learn more about them and resolve them by modifying your robots.txt file.
Conclusion:
Creating a robots.txt file can help improve your real estate website’s search engine rankings by telling search engines which pages to focus on, and which pages to avoid. If you haven’t already, creating one by following the best practices outlined in this blog post can help prevent errors, increase crawlability, and improve overall visibility. Remember to check your file regularly to avoid accidental blockages, and use Google Search Console to identify and resolve any crawl errors on your website. Happy optimizing!