In today’s digital world, the success of a website is not limited to content alone. Website optimization is a strategy that helps users find your site more effectively and improves search engine rankings. In this article, we will cover four of the important topics to improve your website performance: Robots.txt, Sitemap, Canonical URL and Bad Links. These elements allow your website to be understood and indexed more effectively by search engines and better discovered by users. If you want to get detailed information about these four factors and learn in detail, you should definitely continue reading our article.
What is a Sitemap?
In fact, the sitemap is an XML file that helps indicate which pages Google bots should visit when searching for our site. Sitemap can help search engines index your site faster and more comprehensively. This XML file describes the content of your site and helps search engines crawl and index your pages more effectively.
Sitemap tells Google bots and other search engines which areas of your site they should crawl with priority. This allows them to index new content faster. It also shows the structure of your site’s content. By understanding this structure, search engines index your site more effectively and allow users to find the content they want faster.
Creating a Sitemap: How is a Sitemap Created?
There are various ways to create a site map. The first of the most practical is to use online tools. Many online tools can help you automatically create a sitemap by scanning your website’s URLs. These tools usually present you the file they created and ask you to add this file to the main directory of your site. There are many sitemap generating tools available. These tools automatically create a sitemap by crawling your site and indexing your pages. You can use tools offered by Google, such as Google Search Console, or choose third-party tools.
It is important to submit the sitemap you have created to Google through tools such as Google Search Console. This can help your site be indexed faster.
What is Robots.txt?
Robot.txt is a text file that allows us to determine the areas we want and do not want to be scanned with the commands we give it. This file provides instructions to websites’ search engines and other similar services, describing the structure and content of the site. The Robot.txt file is located in the root directory of the website.
Creating Robot.txt: How is Robot.txt Created?
Creating a robot.txt file is quite simple. First, you must open a text editor application on your computer. into the file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /hidden/
Allow: /on/
You must write in the format . In this example, all search engines (*) are prohibited from accessing the /hidden/ directory, but allowed to the /public/ directory. You can then save your file. When saving, you should save the file name as “robot.txt”. You must upload the robots.txt file you created to the root directory of your website. This means that the file is in a location that can be accessed from web browsers. You can test the robots.txt file you created with Google Search Console or a similar tool. This will help you verify that the file is working correctly and passing the correct directives to search engines.
What Does Canonical Mean? What is Canonical URL?
Websites may contain URLs that are identical or have very similar content. This is especially common on large websites, systems that create dynamic content, or sites with content divided into various categories. Canonical URL is used to combine different URLs with the same or similar content and to indicate to search engines which version is primary or priority.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/urunler/bilgisayarlar/laptop” />
It is determined as follows. Canonical URL plays an important role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies and can help improve the performance of the site.
Invalid URL Removal
There are various ways to remove pages we do not want on our website. One of these is to get help from the Google Search Console tool. First, go to Google Search Console and log in with your Google account. If you have more than one website connected via your Google account, select the relevant website. Go to the “Scope” section from the left menu and select the “Uninstall” option under it. On the “Removal” page, click the “Add Removal Request” button. Add the URL you want to remove. This may be invalid or invalid.It may be the URL to be downloaded. Then choose whether to remove this URL temporarily or permanently. Submit a removal request to Google by clicking the “Remove Request” button.
This action is to submit a request to Google to remove a particular URL. However, this process includes a temporary removal request, and once Google approves this request, it will temporarily remove the URL. If you want a permanent removal, you may need to update the content structure of your website and make the necessary edits.
These steps generally represent ways to remove an invalid URL. However, each website and platform may be different, so it is important to check the specific steps specific to the system and service used. Remember, this process only affects Google. It may not have any effect on other search engines and users. Additionally, it may take some time for the removal request to be approved.
In this article, we touched on Robots.txt and Sitemap, Cannonical URL and also Bad Links. If you liked our article, you can click here to read our other blog articles.
