Robots Exclusion Standard

Want a website or page to rank as high as possible in the search engines without affecting your website’s server space? This is possible with Robot Exclusion Standard. What is Robots Exclusion Standard and how does it affect SEO? On this page, we explain this to you.

What is Robots Exclusion Standard?

Robot Exclusion Standard is a protocol that makes it possible to shield a Web site from search engine search robots. In this way, you are able to have a website, or parts of it, not included in search engine search results.

The operation of Robots Exclusion Standard in practice

A search engine uses so-called bots, also called web crawlers, which scour the Internet and index websites. Copying information from a website to place it in the search engines happens to ensure that you, as a website, might rank higher. However, this depends on several things, such as website speed and content on the website.

It is possible to set the Robot Exclusion Standard when you want to deny bots access to certain folders.

The impact of Robots Exclusion Standard on SEO

The Robot Exclusion Standard potentially impacts the SEO of a website or page. When you set up this protocol correctly, it is possible to exclude irrelevant pages, allowing a robot to index new pages faster and better. This has the advantage that these pages will rank higher. However, it is important to use the right SEO tools so that these pages are actually relevant to search results.

My advice

The Robot Exclusion Standard is primarily designed to keep irrelevant data from displaying for visitors in search results. In addition, it is also not proven that setting this protocol actually helps, since bots are also sophisticated and in some cases ignore this protocol.

We recommend setting Robot Exclusion Standard to reduce the load on your website’s servers from web crawlers. In addition, it is also good for your crawl budget and provides SEO benefits.


Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Robots Exclusion Standard?

Robots Exclusion Standard is a way to (partially) shield websites from Google’s robots. This is done by using the Robots.txt file. This file can be edited to include certain pages (or an entire website). Note that this differs from using a noindex tag. A noindex tag prevents indexing, the Robots.txt prevents crawling as well as indexing of the website.

What is the impact of Robots Exclusion Standard on SEO?

Setting up the protocol correctly can exclude irrelevant pages. This allows bots to index pages better and faster. This in turn provides a higher ranking in search results for these pages.

Senior SEO-specialist

Ralf van Veen

Senior SEO-specialist
Five stars
My clients give me a 5.0 on Google out of 77 reviews

I have been working for 10 years as an independent SEO specialist for companies (in the Netherlands and abroad) that want to rank higher in Google in a sustainable manner. During this period I have consulted A-brands, set up large-scale international SEO campaigns and coached global development teams in the field of search engine optimization.

With this broad experience within SEO, I have developed the SEO course and helped hundreds of companies with improved findability in Google in a sustainable and transparent way. For this you can consult my portfolio, references and collaborations.

This article was originally published on 22 March 2024. The last update of this article was on 22 March 2024. The content of this page was written and approved by Ralf van Veen. Learn more about the creation of my articles in my editorial guidelines.