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The robots.txt file is one of the simplest yet most important tools in technical SEO. Done right, it helps search engines crawl your website efficiently, prevents crawl budget waste, and protects sensitive or irrelevant sections from being accessed by bots. Done wrong, it can block critical content, waste link value, or even deindex your entire site. Robots.txt is a plain text file located at the root of your domain It gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which parts of your site they can or cannot crawl. It is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol — a voluntary standard that major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex follow.

 Important: Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed if linked from other sites or included in your sitemap.