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Who this article is for: Plug In SEO users who want learn how to address SEO issues flagged by the SEO Shop Scanner that are related to your Robots.txt file and Sitemap. What you'll learn: You'll learn about the importance of robot.txt files and sitemaps and how to solve associated issues. |
| Offer: If you'd like to have our SEO Expert's help with setting up Plug In Useful for your shop and speeding up your SEO success journey, please consider purchasing our Quick Start Service. |
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What are Robot.TXT and Sitemap
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file that acts like a guide for search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot. Think of it as a set of instructions left at your doorstep for mail carriers. This file tells crawlers which pages on your website they can and cannot access for indexing. It helps website owners control how their site is presented in search results. For example, you might want to block crawlers from accessing login pages or temporary files to avoid cluttering search results with irrelevant content. Robots.txt can also be used to specify the location of your sitemap, which helps search engines discover all your important pages.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all the important URLs (web addresses) on your website. It's like a map for search engines, helping them find and index all your content efficiently. Sitemaps can be created in various formats, but the most common is XML (Extensible Markup Language) or HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). By submitting your sitemap to search engines, you ensure they are aware of all your webpages, even if they haven't been discovered by crawlers yet. This can be particularly helpful for new websites or those with complex structures. An up-to-date sitemap also helps search engines understand the relative importance of different pages on your website.
Shopify Makes It Easy
Shopify does a good job of automatically creating the robot.txt files and sitemaps for your site. There are apps for sale in the app store that add some bells and whistles for both of these files. However, there is no real evidence that we can find that shows these third party apps get better results than the ones that Shopify provides out of the box.
File Not Found
If you are seeing a File Not Found error in the SEO Shop Scan results, you should contact Shopify (or the third party app if you're paying for an alternative sitemap or robot.txt file) right away. If there is a problem that prevents the robots.txt file or sitemap file from being seen by the search engine bots, this can have a detrimental impact very quickly your organic traffic.
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