Configure Robots.txt

As you know, configuring robot.txt is important to any website that is working on a site’s SEO. Particularly, when you configure the sitemap to allow search engines to index your store, it is necessary to give web crawlers the instructions in the robot.txt file to avoid indexing the disallowed sites. The robot.txt file, that resides in the root of your Magento installation, is directive that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing can recognize and track easily. In this post, I will introduce the guides to configure the robot.txt file so that it works well with your site.

Following steps to Configure robots.txt in Magento 2

On the Admin panel, click Stores. In the Settings section, select Configuration.
Select Design under General in the panel on the left
Open the Search Engine Robots section, and continue with following:
- In Default Robots, select one of the following:
  - INDEX, FOLLOW
  - NOINDEX, FOLLOW
  - INDEX, NOFOLLOW
  - NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
- In the Edit Custom instruction of robots.txt File field, enter custom instructions if needed.
- In the Reset to Defaults field, click on Reset to Default button if you need to restore the default instructions.
When complete, click Save Config.

How to Configure Robots.txt

Examples of Custom Instructions

Allows Full Access

User-agent:*
Disallow:

Disallows Access to All Folders

User-agent:*
Disallow: /

Default Instructions for Magento 2

Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /*SID=
Disallow: /*?

# Disable checkout & customer account
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /onestepcheckout/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customer/account/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/

# Disable Search pages
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/

# Disable common folders
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /phpserver/
Disallow: /pub/

# Disable Tag & Review (Avoid duplicate content)

Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /review/

# Common files
Disallow: /composer.json
Disallow: /composer.lock
Disallow: /CONTRIBUTING.md
Disallow: /CONTRIBUTOR_LICENSE_AGREEMENT.html
Disallow: /COPYING.txt
Disallow: /Gruntfile.js
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /nginx.conf.sample
Disallow: /package.json
Disallow: /php.ini.sample
Disallow: /RELEASE_NOTES.txt

# Disable sorting (Avoid duplicate content)
Disallow: /*?*product_list_mode=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_order=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_limit=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_dir=

# Disable version control folders and others
Disallow: /*.git
Disallow: /*.CVS
Disallow: /*.Zip$
Disallow: /*.Svn$
Disallow: /*.Idea$
Disallow: /*.Sql$
Disallow: /*.Tgz$

More examples

Block Google bot from a folder

User-agent: Googlebot 
Disallow: /subfolder/

Block Google bot from a page

User-agent: Googlebot 
Disallow: /subfolder/page-url.html

Common Web crawlers (Bots)

Here are some common bots in the internet.

User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: Googlebot-Image/1.0
User-agent: Googlebot-Video/1.0
User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: Slurp		# Yahoo
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
User-agent: Baiduspider
User-agent: YandexBot
User-agent: facebot		# Facebook
User-agent: ia_archiver		# Alexa

It comes to the end of the tutorial: How to Configure Robots.txt in Magento 2.

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