Tell search engines what to crawl. Choose your rules, add the paths to block and your sitemap, and this builds a valid robots.txt to copy straight into your site's root.
robots.txt tells crawlers which paths to skip — useful for admin, cart or duplicate URLs. But it's a crawl instruction, not a security or privacy control: blocked pages can still be indexed if linked elsewhere, and the file is public. Don't use it to hide sensitive pages (use noindex or auth for that). Always include your sitemap line so search engines find your content fast.
In your site's root, so it lives at yoursite.com/robots.txt. Upload it there or use your CMS's robots.txt setting.
No — it stops crawling, but a blocked page can still be indexed if other sites link to it. Use a noindex tag or password protection to truly keep a page out of search.
Usually only admin, cart, search-result and duplicate URLs. Don't block CSS/JS or pages you want ranked. An SEO plugin like Rank Math manages this safely.
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