Every website manager needs to know certain basic terms that will help them achieve better results. And as is well known, the success of a website depends largely on the quality of the content published.
Why? Well, Google, through its crawlers, will give higher rankings in the SERPs to pages that stand out for their quality content.
But for this to be possible, it’s necessary to adhere to certain parameters for each phase of website development. Such is the case with the content generation phase, using the widely used robots.txt file .
For those who don’t know, the robots.txt file is a command accessible from the domain root. It tells Google what content should be indexed and placed in its SERPs. But going further, it’s worth noting that it works through a series of commands. One of them is the one we’ll focus on in this article: disallow .
Etymologically, it’s an Anglo-Saxon word that translates as disable or reject. And that pretty much defines what it’s all about. This is a search engine bot exclusion scheme designed to prevent these bots from adding irrelevant information to search results.
This command indicates that it should not be indexed under any circumstances. Why? It could be that the page is still being edited and isn’t ready for public view. So for now, it’s best to hide it.
What is a disallow for ?
The disallow instruction is used to tell search engines which content they should not follow or index. This allows them to encrypt data that should not be published and classify the most relevant data.
This also helps your SEO goals, as it will only result in your top-tier content.
When you don’t want content to be visible to Google or other search engine robots, this is the ideal option.
In fact, the disallow command is used more than you might think. It’s an indispensable tool in the creation and development phase of a website’s content. Otherwise, the SERP results would be a disaster!
Additionally, this tool allows you to optimize the indexing resources allocated to your page. Google is responsible for scanning new websites every day, but there’s a certain limit for each domain. So with Disallow , you can channel the search engine’s attention to what you really want to be published.
Importance of disallow
And for all the reasons mentioned above, the reality is that the disallow command is incredibly important for web content creators, but also for users in general.
The first thing is that disallow simplifies the task of search engines when analyzing a web page. This means that quality results end up appearing in the SERPs. And who benefits? Well, the people who log on to the internet every day to perform millions of searches.
This is possible because the first thing the crawlers do is analyze the robots.txt command, detecting the status of that specific command. **This results in better and higher SEO rankings because only what the developer deems necessary is indexed.**
Additionally, the disallow command allows you to control the settings to help avoid penalties from Google’s algorithms. This achieves:
- Limit access to duplicate data.
- Restrict access to obsolete or unused code files.
- Restrict data from directories or subdirectories of a website.
- It enables access to the website’s sitemap , allowing the crawler to quickly become familiar with it.
How to use a disallow ?
It can be used through specific characters in a line of code when developing or editing a web page.
To use this command you must write the code: disallow : /
And then specify which part of the website you want to restrict. For example:
User-agent: *
disallow : /
The above option is used to block all robots.
In case you want to block a specific bot… let’s suppose the Bing search engine places the instruction:
User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /
We hope that everything about the always useful disallow command is now clear to you !
