Webmaster Tools Suite

The robots.txt file is one of the most important yet often misunderstood tools in a webmaster's toolkit. This text file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they can and cannot access.

Why is robots.txt important?

A properly configured robots.txt file helps with:

• Preventing search engines from indexing private or duplicate content
• Conserving crawl budget by preventing crawlers from wasting time on unimportant pages
• Blocking access to resources like images, scripts, or stylesheets you don't want indexed
• Specifying the location of your sitemap

Common mistakes to avoid

• Blocking CSS/JS files (can hurt how Google indexes your pages)
• Using robots.txt for security (it's publicly accessible)
• Having syntax errors that cause crawlers to ignore the file
• Blocking too much content unnecessarily

Best practices

• Place the file in your root directory (https://example.com/robots.txt)
• Use our Robots.txt Generator to create a proper file
• Test your robots.txt in Google Search Console
• Keep the file updated as your site structure changes

An XML sitemap is like a roadmap of your website that helps search engines discover and understand all your important pages. While search engines can find pages by following links, a sitemap ensures they don't miss anything important.

When you need a sitemap

Consider creating a sitemap if your site:

• Is large (hundreds or thousands of pages)
• Has pages that aren't well linked to each other
• Is new with few external links
• Uses rich media content or shows up in Google News

What to include

• All important pages you want indexed
• Canonical versions of pages (avoid duplicates)
• Alternate language versions if you have multilingual content
• Video or image pages if you want them to appear in specialized search results

Sitemap tips

• Keep your sitemap under 50MB (split into multiple sitemaps if needed)
• Update it regularly as you add/remove content
• Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Reference it in your robots.txt file

With Google's mobile-first indexing, having a properly configured viewport meta tag is more important than ever. This small piece of HTML controls how your site displays on mobile devices.

Why the viewport meta tag matters

Without a proper viewport tag:

• Mobile users may see tiny, unreadable text
• Content may appear zoomed out or require horizontal scrolling
• Your site may rank lower in mobile search results
• User experience suffers, increasing bounce rates

Recommended configuration

For most websites, this is the ideal viewport tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Advanced options

You can also control:

• Minimum/maximum zoom levels
• Whether users can zoom
• How the page scales on different devices
• iOS-specific behaviors like shrink-to-fit