The Answer To This Interview Question:
A robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of a website they are allowed or disallowed to access. It’s commonly used to block access to areas of a site that don’t need to be crawled, like admin panels, staging environments, or duplicate content areas.
What The Interviewer Really Wants To Hear:
The interviewer wants to understand your technical knowledge and how well you manage website crawlability.
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Tips To Answer This Interview Question Successfully
Explain how robots.txt helps manage website crawl budgets.
Robots.txt is useful for managing crawl budgets by instructing search engines to avoid crawling less important pages. This ensures that critical pages are crawled more frequently, improving their indexing.
Explain when it’s appropriate to use robots.txt vs. a robots meta noindex tag.
Robots.txt is ideal for keeping crawlers away from non-public areas, such as admin sections or staging environments. However, if you want to prevent a page from being indexed but still allow it to be crawled (such as thank-you pages), you should use the noindex meta tag instead of robots.txt.
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