robots.txt Explained in Simple Words (and How I Broke My Blog With It)

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Let me be honest—I didn’t even know what a robots.txt file was until I accidentally blocked my entire blog from Google. 😅
One line of code, and poof, my content vanished from search results.

If you’re wondering what robots.txt is and whether you should touch it (or leave it alone), this post is for you.

🤖 So, What Is robots.txt?

Think of robots.txt as a gatekeeper file. It’s a small text file that tells search engine bots (like Googlebot) what parts of your website they can or can’t visit.

It sits quietly in your site’s root directory like this:
yourwebsite.com/robots.txt

📌 Why Should You Care?

Because search engines don’t magically understand your site. They need instructions. If you mess this up, you might accidentally:

  • Block Google from crawling your entire site 😬
  • Hide important pages (like your homepage or blog posts)
  • Waste your “crawl budget” on useless stuff like tags or archives

🛠️ Here's What I Did Wrong

When I started my first blog, I wanted to hide a few pages that weren’t ready. So I googled something like:

“how to block pages from search”

Then, I pasted this into my robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

What I meant to do was block just one page.
But this line basically said:
“Hey Google, don’t crawl anything on my site.”

Oops. My traffic dropped within a week.

✅ What You Should Do Instead

Here’s a clean, safe starting point for most blogs:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
  • Disallow: /search – Blocks tag and search pages (which don’t add SEO value).
  • Allow: / – Lets Google crawl everything else.

🔍 How to Check If Yours Works

Go to:
https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

If you see nothing or just random junk, you probably haven’t set it yet (which is fine—better than breaking stuff).

You can test yours here:
🔧 Google Robots Testing Tool

💡 Final Thoughts

If you're not sure what to block, don’t block anything yet. Start by learning, watching your Search Console, and only update robots.txt when you have a good reason.

Trust me: one line can hurt more than help if you don’t understand what it’s doing.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve ever made a silly SEO mistake, share it below—I’d love to hear it. 😄

Tags: robots.txt, SEO basics, Googlebot, crawl control, blogging tips

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