Welcome to our new weekly brain busting “search tip of the week”. Every Monday (unless there is a bank holiday) we will be imparting to you, our valued readers, a little titbit that will help you in your quest to increase your visibility online.
This weeks tip is as follows:

Use robots.txt to keep Google happy!

We have been reading a lot lately about how Google likes sites that don’t hog their bandwidth by allowing Google to spider content on their site that would not necessarily be of use to visitors, and therefore of use for Google to index and rank.

Therefore our tip is to make sure you utilise robots.txt to ask the Googlebot to ignore these type of pages on your site.

E.g.

• pages with duplicate content
• printer friendly versions of of pages
• stubbs (empty pages produced by your content management system)
• pop up pages with no navigation

Using robots.txt means Google is happier as you only feed it worthy pages, and you don’t end up with people entering the site through pages not intended as entry pages.

Everyones a winner!!!!