GoDaddy: How to Add or Edit Your robots.txt File

Making robots.txt Management Simple and Effective

Welcome to your guide on the robots.txt file for your GoDaddy website! The robots.txt file gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which pages on your site to crawl and which to ignore. In this guide, we'll explain how GoDaddy's Website Builder handles this file and what you can do to manage it, in a way that's easy to understand, even if you're not a technical expert.

How GoDaddy Manages Your robots.txt File

GoDaddy's Website Builder automatically generates and manages a robots.txt file for your site with rules that are optimized for most websites. For the vast majority of users, no changes are needed. Direct editing of the robots.txt file is not available in the Website Builder.

Viewing Your robots.txt File:

You can view your site's robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the end of your domain (e.g., yourdomain.com/robots.txt). This will show you the default rules that GoDaddy has set up for you.

[Screenshot needed: Browser window showing a sample GoDaddy robots.txt file]

Hiding a Page from Search Engines:

If you want to prevent a specific page from being indexed by search engines, you can do so in the page settings.

Go to the Page Settings for the page you want to hide, and in the SEO tab, you will find an option to hide the page from search results.

[Screenshot needed: GoDaddy page SEO settings with the option to hide the page from search results highlighted ]

When to Leave It Alone:

For most users, the default robots.txt file is ideal. It is designed to ensure your site is crawled effectively by search engines. Since direct editing is not supported, relying on the page-level controls is the intended and safest method.

Key Takeaways for Success

Keep it Simple: You don't need to be a tech wizard to make meaningful improvements to your site.

Trust the Defaults: GoDaddy has optimized the default settings for you.

Use Page-Level Controls: For most needs, hiding a page from search results is the

safest and easiest option.

We're confident that with these clear instructions, you'll understand how the robots.txt file works on your GoDaddy website. Keep up the great work, and trust that GoDaddy is handling the technical details for you!