Shopify Sites Can Now Edit Their Robots.txt File

Shopify shops at the moment are capable of edit their robots.txt file, which supplies house owners extra management over how search engines crawl their website.

Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO, broke the information this night on Twitter whereas including that it’d take till Monday for this function to roll out to everybody.

All Shopify shops begin with the identical robots.txt, which the corporate says works for many websites, however now the file could be edited by way of the robots.txt.liquid theme template.

Site house owners could make the next edits to the robots.txt file:

• Allow or disallow sure URLs from being crawled
• Add crawl-delay guidelines for sure crawlers
• Add further sitemap URLs
• Block sure crawlers

Shopify recommends utilizing Liquid so as to add or take away directives from the robots.txt.liquid template, because it preserves the power to maintain the file routinely up to date.

How To Edit Robots.txt in Shopify

Here are the steps to customizing a Shopify retailer’s robots.txt file:

• From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.
• Click Actions, after which click on Edit Code.
• Click Add a brand new template, after which choose robots.
• Click Create template.
• Make the adjustments that you just need to make to the default template.
• Save adjustments to the robots.txt.liquid file in your revealed theme.

Alternatively, website house owners can delete the contents of the template and substitute it with plain textual content guidelines, although Shopify doesn’t suggest it because it gained’t be routinely up to date.

ThemeKit or command line adjustments will protect the robots.txt.liquid file. Uploading a theme from inside the Themes part of the Shopify admin is not going to import robots.txt.liquid.

Shopify warns that modifying the robots.txt.liquid file is an unsupported customization, which suggests their assist workforce can’t assist with edits.

“Incorrect use of the function can lead to lack of all site visitors,” cautions Shopify. Though that’s true of the robots.txt file for any website.

Related: Shopify SEO – How to Optimize Your Shopify Site for Google

Additional Resources

Here are some sources from Shopify which will help with modifying robots.txt.

First, right here’s the robots.txt liquid template referenced earlier.

Shopify additionally gives a robots.txt customization tutorial.

SEOs are fairly pleased with the announcement of this replace, saying it’s about time Shopify presents the power to edit robots.txt.

The function is rolling out proper now. As talked about, if you don’t but have entry to it, you seemingly will by Monday.

User-agent: everybody
Allow: /
Starting right now, you will have full management over how search engine bots see your retailer. #shopifyseohttps://t.co/Hz9Ijj5h1y

— Tobi Lutke (@tobi) June 18, 2021