A robots.txt file gives search engine crawlers specific instructions about a website. It’s one of the few ways that site owners can control the pages that search engines index.
Besides blocking search crawlers, a robots.txt file is also necessary to avoid generating 404 error log notation. As such, a small mistake on such a vital text file can cause two problems. These are:
- Search engines crawling pages they shouldn’t crawl.
- Accidentally preventing public web pages from ranking.
Indeed, errors in robots.txt file are a common source of search ranking issues. That’s why Bing introduced its enhanced robots.txt tester to address these problems.
Executives at the company wrote in a blog post announcement:
“We at Bing understand that frustration of our users and hence have come up with our new and enhanced robots.txt tester tool.”
Here’s how the tool works.
Using Bing’s Robots.txt Tester to Identify Crawling Issues
SEOs can test and validate their robots.txt file using the new Bing tester tool. It’s also useful for checking whether a URL is blocked, which statement blocks it, and for which user agent.
Besides, webmasters can now make changes to robots.txt files using the editor.
Thanks to the test functionality, it’s now easy to compare the submitted URL against the editor’s content. That way, SEOs and site owners can identify errors on the spot.
Users can also download the edited robots.txt file offline for updates. Even if you made the changes elsewhere, the fetch option could help retrieve the latest version of the file.
“If there have been changes to the robots file elsewhere and updated, the webmaster can use the Fetch latest option to get the latest robots file of the property,” says Bing.
The tool works as AdIdxbot — the crawler that Bing Ads uses — and Bingbot. What’s more, users can toggle between these two crawlers as they wish.
“We are excited to present this feature to our users, especially now that we have migrated to a new and improved platform and experience,” the Bing team concluded.
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