{"id":14729,"date":"2022-01-23T12:40:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-23T07:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rankwatch.com\/blog\/?p=14729"},"modified":"2023-07-05T12:14:36","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T06:44:36","slug":"handle-bot-herding-and-spider-wrangling-for-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rankwatch.com\/blog\/handle-bot-herding-and-spider-wrangling-for-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Handle Bot Herding And Spider Wrangling For Rankings?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Handle<\/a><\/p>\n

Google crawlers index every piece of content that you publish on your website. These crawlers are programmed softwares that follow links and codes and deliver it to an algorithm. Then, the algorithm indexes it and adds your content to a vast database. This way, whenever a user searches for a keyword, the search engine extracts and ranks related results from the database of already indexed pages.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google assigns a crawl budget to every website and the crawlers execute your site’s crawling accordingly. You must manage and utilize the crawl budget to ensure intelligent crawling and indexing of your entire website.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this post, you can learn about the tricks and tools to handle how the search engines bots\/spiders or crawlers crawl and index your website.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Optimization of Disallow Directive for Robot.txt:<\/h2>\n

\"Robots.txt\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Robots.txt is a text file with a strict syntax that works like a guide for the spiders to determine how to crawl your site. A robots.txt file is saved in the host repositories of your website from where crawlers look for the URLs. To optimize these Robots.txt or “Robots Exclusion Protocol”, you can use some tricks that can help the URLs of your site get crawled by Google crawlers for higher rankings.<\/p>\n

One of those tricks is using a <\/span>“Disallow Directive\u201d<\/b>, this is like putting a signboard of <\/span>“Restricted Area”<\/b> on specific sections of your website. To optimize the Disallow Directive, you must understand the first line of defense: <\/span>“User-agents.”<\/b><\/p>\n

What is a User-agent Directive?<\/h3>\n

Each Robots.txt file consists of one or more rules and amongst them, the user-agent rule is most important. This rule provides the crawlers with access and non-access to a particular list on the website.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, the user-agent directive is used to address to a specific crawler and give it instructions on how to execute the crawl.<\/span><\/p>\n

Types of Google Crawlers Popularly Used:<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nDisallow directive:<\/h3>\n

Now, after learning about the bot which is assigned to crawl your website, you can optimize different sections of it based on the type of user-agent. Some essential tricks and examples you can follow to optimize the disallow directive of your website are:<\/p>\n