Why do you Need to Validate your Robots.txt?

Robots.txt files tell the search engine bots which parts of your site to crawl or not to crawl, and which agents are allowed to do so.

An invalid robots.txt can lead to miscommunication with search engines, potentially blocking important pages or allowing access to private areas.

Validating your robots.txt ensures that your site's crawl instructions are correctly specified, which will avoid unintended blockings which could hinder your site's SEO performance.

This is why creating a robot.txt file and ensure it has a valid syntax is not just a technical curiosity, it is rather mandatory in an extremely competitive landscape, where you can assume all your competitor are taking care of the small details to try and dominate the SERPS.

How to Ensure Robots.txt Validity?

The robots.txt file has a specific syntax, with specific directives that are understood. You need to check your robots.txt for errors on a frequent basis and use tools like this validator.

Your main goal should be to keep up-to-date with the latest robots.txt specifications to make sure that the syntax of the file remains valid.

In case of doubt, you should keep things open. Meaning, you should rather let bots access your site if you are not sure what to block, as opposed to unknowingly block bots that YOU WANT to visit your site, such as the Googlebot.

Other On-Page Fixes that Can Help with Your Rankings

The main rule is to write CLEAR, well-organized content. You want to engage the user with your content, and you need to set your content depth to a point that satisfies user intent.

On the other hand, you need to improve your on-page factors, such a speeding up your site by minifying assets, and making sure that you don't have JS code blocking the loading of assets unnecessarily.

Other important technical factors include to have correct canonical declarations, which should be part of generating valid meta tags and maintaining a good and complete schema for your pages.