How to Enable Robots.txt file in wordpress

google search console robots check

Welcome to TheSEOGuy. Today we are going to talk about how to enable robots.txt file in wordpress with plugins and without plugins. Robots file is a directive file which gives direction to search engine bot and crawlers to read and index the URLs. Being a webmaster, sometime we don’t want search engine crawlers to index specific URLs such as cart pages, dynamic URLs and CSS and JAVA files. We use robots file to control the crawl and give directions to search engine crawlers by adding allow and disallow statement.

If your website or blog has problems with robots.txt file, then it will impact performance negatively. It is recommended to have a clean robots file on website for smooth crawl and indexing.

About Robots.txt File

Robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. The standard specifies how to inform the web robot about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize websites.

By using robots file we make sure that crawlers follow website according to our requirements. For example, I have a blog which has some pages/post. I don’t want search engines to cache or follow certain pages or directories. In that case I will use robots.txt file to give directions to crawlers to avoid those pages.

Here is how to see live robots

To check the live robots of a website you can simply type domain/robots.txt and hit enter. You can also check the robots status for you website within google search console and see if the live robots are fetched correctly or not. To do this, you can follow given below steps.

  1. Open Search Console
  2. Select the property
  3. Go to settings
  4. Select Robots.txt and click on open report

Refer the screenshot below to test robots.txt file in google search console.

You can open the report and check the live robots status for the website.

How to enable or fix robots.txt file in wordpress

If you are using wordpress and facing this problem then you can solve this problem in minutes. The best way to solve this problem is by using yoast plugin. You have to install yoast plugin into your wordpress. Once you install and activate the plugin, navigate to the Settings› and select File Editor.

Under file editor you can see the robots file and can update the status from there directly. After making the changes in file do not forget to hit the save button.

Keep in mind that Yoast SEO sets its own default rules, which override your existing virtual robots.txt file. That’s easy enough! 

Enable robots.txt fiile without Yoast Plugin

However, if you don’t have plugin installed then you can try to download or create generic robots.txt file and upload it by using FTP clients such as filezilla. You can take help of article Upload Files Using the FileZilla FTP Client (Windows & Mac) to know how to upload files using filezilla.

So these were the steps to enable robots.txt file in wordpress. Hope you get the answer of “how to enable robots.txt in wordpress”.

You may also visit Useful SEO Plugins to boost your SEO score. A complete list of plugins which can help you to boost SEO score and improve your blog/website performances.

Hope this information would help you to enable robots.txt file in wordpress. However, if you still have any question, feedback or suggestion for this information then do comment below. All the feedback and suggestions are very meaningful and I take every feedback very seriously.

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Hi, I am global SEO Expert providing affordable SEO services since 14+ years and counting. Worked for 100+ national and international brands. Top Indian SEO Consultant you are looking for #TheSEOGuy.

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