Freemius

Pagup

Sajjad Ali

Better Robots.txt generates a virtual robots.txt for WordPress, enhancing your website’s SEO (indexation capabilities, Google ranking, etc.) and its loading performance. Our plugin is compatible with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Google Merchant, WooCommerce, and directory-based network sites (MULTISITE) and features now (2023) exclusive Artificial Intelligence (OpenAI) optimization settings for greater performance.
With Better Robots.txt, you can specify which search engines are permitted to crawl your website and provide clear directives about their allowed activities. You can also set a crawl-delay to shield your hosting server from aggressive scrapers. Better Robots.txt empowers you with complete control over your WordPress robots.txt content through the custom setting box.
Minimize <a href="https://better-robots.com/how-to-save-the-planet-with-your-website/" rel="nofollow ugc">your site’s ecological footprint and the production of greenhouse gas</a> (CO2) associated with its online presence.
According to ChatGPT (OpenAI), the robots.txt produced by the PRO version of Better-Robots.txt is the most sophisticated and comprehensive available on the WEB for a WordPress site.
A quick overview:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="How to optimize Better robots.txt Plugin (WordPress)" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/306589027?dnt=1&app_id=122963" width="750" height="422" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write"></iframe>
SUPPORTED IN 7 LANGUAGES
Better Robots.txt plugins are available and translated into the following languages: Chinese –汉语/漢語, English, French – Français, Russian –Руссɤɢɣ, Portuguese – Português, Spanish – Español, German – Deutsch.
Did you know that…
<ul>
<li>The robots.txt file is a straightforward text file positioned on your web server that instructs web crawlers (like Googlebot) on whether they should access a file or not.</li>
<li>The robots.txt file governs how search engine spiders perceive and engage with your web pages;</li>
<li>This file and the bots it communicates with, are integral components of how search engines operate;</li>
<li>The initial thing a search engine crawler examines when it visits a page is the robots.txt file;</li>
</ul>
The robots.txt is a reservoir of SEO potential that’s ready to be tapped into. Give Better Robots.txt a try!
About the Pro version (additional features):
1. Enhance your content visibility on search engines with your sitemap!
Ensure your pages, articles, and products, even the most recent ones, are recognized by search engines!
The Better Robots.txt plugin is designed to integrate with the Yoast SEO plugin and Rank Math (arguably the best SEO Plugin for WordPress websites). It will automatically detect if you are using Yoast SEO / Rank Math and if the sitemap feature is enabled. If so, it will automatically add instructions to the Robots.txt file directing bots/crawlers to review your sitemap for recent changes on your website (allowing search engines to crawl any new content).
If you wish to add your own sitemap (or if you are using a different SEO plugin), you simply need to copy and paste your Sitemap URL, and Better Robots.txt will incorporate it into your WordPress Robots.txt.
2. Safeguard your data and content
Prevent harmful bots from scraping your website and exploiting your data.
The Better Robots.txt plugin assists in blocking most common malicious bots from crawling and scraping your data.
There are both beneficial and harmful bots that crawl your site. Beneficial bots, like Google bot, crawl your site to index it for search engines. However, others crawl your site for more malicious reasons such as repurposing your content (text, price, etc.) for republishing, downloading entire archives of your site, or extracting your images. Some bots have even been reported to crash entire websites due to excessive bandwidth usage.
The Better Robots.txt plugin shields your website against spiders/scrapers identified as harmful bots by Distil Networks.
3. Conceal & safeguard your backlinks
Prevent competitors from discovering your profitable backlinks.
Backlinks, also known as “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink. Backlinks are particularly valuable for SEO as they signify a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Essentially, backlinks to your website signal to search engines that others endorse your content.
If numerous sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can deduce that the content is link-worthy, and therefore worth displaying on a SERP. Thus, earning these backlinks can positively impact a site’s ranking position or search visibility. In the SEM industry, it’s common for specialists to identify the sources of these backlinks (competitors) to select the best ones and generate high-quality backlinks for their own clients.
Given that creating highly profitable backlinks for a company is time-consuming (time + energy + budget), allowing your competitors to identify and replicate them so easily is a significant loss of efficiency.
Better Robots.txt aids in blocking all SEO crawlers (aHref, Majestic, Semrush) to keep your backlinks hidden.
4. Prevent Spam Backlinks
Bots that populate your website’s comment forms with messages like ‘great article,’ ‘love the info,’ ‘hope you can elaborate more on the topic soon’ or even personalized comments, including the author’s name, are widespread. Spambots are becoming increasingly sophisticated over time, and unfortunately, comment spam links can seriously damage your backlink profile.
Better Robots.txt assists in preventing these comments from being indexed by search engines.
5. Artificial Intelligence at the service of Robots.txt
In 2023, we added a robots.txt optimization feature based on OpenAI’s (ChatGPT) recommendations for any WordPress site. These settings maximize the efficiency of robots.txt for search engines to streamline the crawling of a website. More improvements are on the way…
In 2023, ChatGPT 4, after auditing several million robots.txt files available on the WEB, assessed that the robots.txt deployed by the PRO version of the Better-Robots.txt plugin was the most advanced, comprehensive, and sophisticated configuration currently available for WordPress environments. A point of pride for our team!
6. SEO Tools
In the process of enhancing our plugin, we’ve incorporated shortcut links to two crucial tools for those concerned about their search engine rankings: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tool. If you’re not already utilizing them, you can now manage your website’s indexing while optimizing your robots.txt! We’ve also provided direct access to a Mass Ping tool, enabling you to ping your links on over 70 search engines.
Additionally, we’ve created four shortcut links to some of the best Online SEO Tools, directly accessible through Better Robots.txt SEO PRO. This means you can now check your site’s loading performance, analyze your SEO score, identify your current SERP rankings with keywords & traffic, and even scan your entire website for dead links (404, 503 errors, etc.) directly from the plugin.
7. Stand Out
We thought we could add a unique touch to Better Robots.txt by introducing a feature that lets you “customize” your WordPress robots.txt with your own distinctive “signature.” Many major companies worldwide have personalized their robots.txt by adding proverbs (https://www.yelp.com/robots.txt), slogans (https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt), or even drawings (https://store.nike.com/robots.txt – at the bottom). Why not do the same? That’s why we’ve dedicated a specific area on the settings page where you can write or draw anything you want (really) without affecting your robots.txt efficiency.
8. Prevent Crawling of Redundant WooCommerce Links
We’ve introduced a unique feature that blocks specific links (“add-to-cart”, “orderby”, “filter”, cart, account, checkout, etc.) from being crawled by search engines. Most of these links demand a significant amount of CPU, memory & bandwidth usage (on the hosting server) as they are not cacheable and/or create “infinite” crawling loops (while they are unnecessary).
By optimizing your WordPress robots.txt for WooCommerce when running an online store, you can allocate more processing power to the pages that truly matter and enhance your loading performance.
9. Dodge Crawler Traps
“Crawler traps” are structural issues within a website that lead crawlers to discover a virtually infinite number of irrelevant URLs. In theory, crawlers could get stuck in one part of a website and never finish crawling these irrelevant URLs.
Better Robots.txt aids in preventing crawler traps, which can harm crawl budget and result in duplicate content.
10. Growth Hacking Tools
Today’s fastest-growing companies, including Amazon, Airbnb, and Facebook, have all achieved breakout growth by aligning their teams around a high-velocity testing/learning process. This is referred to as Growth Hacking. Growth hacking is a process of rapidly experimenting with and implementing marketing and promotional strategies that are solely focused on efficient and rapid business growth. Better Robots.txt provides a list of over 150+ tools available online to propel your growth.
11. Robots.txt Post Meta Box for Manual Exclusions
This Post Meta Box allows you to manually set if a page should be visible (or not) on search engines by injecting a dedicated “disallow” + “noindex” rule inside your WordPress robots.txt. Why is this beneficial for your ranking on search engines? Simply because some pages are not meant to be crawled/indexed.
Thank you pages, landing pages, pages containing exclusively forms are useful for visitors but not for crawlers, and you don’t need them to be visible on search engines. Also, some pages containing dynamic calendars (for online booking) should NEVER be accessible to crawlers because they tend to trap them into infinite crawling loops which directly impacts your crawl budget (and your ranking).
12. Ads.txt & App-ads.txt Crawlability
To ensure that ads.txt & app-ads.txt can be crawled by search engines, the Better Robots.txt plugin ensures they are by default allowed in the Robots.txt file regardless of your configuration. For your information, Authorized Digital Sellers for Web, or ads.txt, is an IAB initiative to improve transparency in programmatic advertising.
You can create your own ads.txt files to identify who is authorized to sell your inventory. The files are publicly available and crawlable by exchanges, Supply-Side Platforms (SSP), and other buyers and third-party vendors. Authorized Sellers for Apps, or app-ads.txt, is an extension to the Authorized Digital Sellers standard. It expands compatibility to support ads shown in mobile apps.
More enhancements are always on the way…

AI-Ready & LLM-Optimized WordPress Robots.txt (+ Sitemaps) – Boost SEO, Traffic & AI Rankings

All-in-One SEO plugin for Wordpress Robots.txt optimization with XML Sitemap detection (Yoast, Rank Math, ...), Woocommerce booster, Robots.

Considering that by 2022, 82% of all Internet traffic will be video content, how do you position your video for maximum exposure? Did you know that transcribing audio and video content can directly improve SEO?
In Google’s “<a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156442?hl=en" rel="nofollow ugc">Video Best Practices</a>” guide, Google says it can extract information from the page hosting the video, including the page text and meta tags, but only some meaning from the audio and video of a file. So, it turns out this mighty search engine can’t see or hear everything… !
A vital way for Google to rank your website is through the addition of keywords — and what better way to use video transcription (containing relevant content) to do so?
Including a transcript to accompany the videos you post on your site allows search engines to more accurately index your site’s video pages, making it much more likely that they will appear in searches and thereby increasing inbound traffic.
The search engine giant’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller confirmed as much when he said <a href="http://www.thesempost.com/optimizing-podcasts-google-seo/" rel="nofollow ugc">that providing video transcription will improve the indexing and searchability</a> of audiovisual content.
How Vidseo works
Instead of simply embeding videos providing passive information, VidSEO plugin will make them strategic for your website’s SEO, with extra information providing more relevant content to search engines to boost your rankings in the search results.
Transcripts of your video content can be the perfect starting place for creating derivative works to sprinkle around and grow your SEO. Transcripts could provide much more information than what’s currently said on video (statistics, key quotes, tips,…). You can also extract valuable points from your transcript for use in shareable social graphics, link-building, or publishing topical blog posts.
Once installed, you will be redirected to Video Setting page:
<ul>
<li>General settings for Vidseo plugin 
— Excerpt length 
— Hide video title by default 
— Disable transcript (to use Vidseo as a regular player) 
— Transcription box background color 
— Transcription Text Color</li>
<li>Custom settings for Youtube & Vimeo videos 
— Global player width 
— Autoplay video 
— Loop video 
— Enable captions/subtitles 
— Disable player controls</li>
<li>Custom Youtube player options 
— Disable annotations 
— Disable Fullscreen buttonf 
— Disable Youtube logo branding</li>
<li>Custom Vimeo player options 
— Muted video 
— Hide title 
— Hide author</li>
</ul>
Once done (very simple), it’s time to embed (with shortcode) your first video with transcription.
Go to Vidseo custom post type section &  create your first shortcode:
<ul>
<li>Define the video host (Youtube/Vimeo)  </li>
<li>Copy-paste your Video URL from Youtube/Vimeo</li>
<li>2 choices here: Either you can get it automatically (Youtube only) from a selected language (if the transcript already exists) OR you can insert your content manually (from Youtube auto generated subtitles/CC)  (check “Get Youtube Video transcription” tab if required)</li>
<li>Customize your content – (SEO – HTML edition available only with PRO version)</li>
<li>Provide a title (on top of the page)</li>
<li>Then SAVE.</li>
<li>Copy-paste your shortcode to your pages/posts/products</li>
<li>Customize your shortcode with attributes (if required – other than defined on VidSEO setting page)</li>
<li>Check the result !</li>
</ul>
About this part, if using Youtube, you can use automated video transcription generated by Youtube from your own videos (channel) or any other video available on Youtube. If required, instead of simply copy-pasting content provided by Youtube (not 100% accurate), you can modify it, improve it and even format it (HTML) by adding titles, links, paragraphs and more relevant content.
In fact, you can use any other content, not specifically related to your video (if no narration) to boost your SEO.
If using Viemo, as Vimeo is not providing video transcription for the moment, it will require to create content or transcript your video manually.
VidSEO plugin features great flebility (Youtube + Vimeo) with content allowing to show (excerpt) or hide transcription to users. So while a visitor may be in a position to watch and listen to your content without the need to see your transcript, it’ll actually be the keywords copied from the audio that enables them to find your page in the first place.
Pro features :
Presently, Automated transcription tools can’t yet deliver <a href="https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/youtube-1-billion-videos-closed-captioning-accuracy-1201990083/" rel="nofollow ugc">100% accuracy</a> and still need human intervention to produce usable results. For example, most inaccuracies in automated transcriptions can be caused by heavy accents, mispronunciation, inaudible speech, background noise, overlapping sounds, dialect, and slang. But as technologies improve, we might see better tools come up.
Because, you will want to create titles, headlines, and subheadings in the transcript for optimal SEO success, you will need of Vidseo PRO:
<ul>
<li>
To format your transcript (HTML Visual Editor) instead of using a regular text area (no HTML)
</li>
<li>
To hide transcript to users (while it’s actually available in HTML)
</li>
<li>
To customize drop-down container background color (including Video Title area background)
</li>
<li>
…
</li>
</ul>
About video transcription
First of all, you should know that the average person watches more than an hour and a half of online video content per day, so if you’re not using video as part of your Web strategy, you should start.
While video are great, they are obviously not text-based, meaning that search engines like Google are not able to crawl them. So despite video sitemaps, all content explained/provided in videos cannot be used for your SEO strategy. In other words, videos are cool for people visiting your website but they will never be the reason why people are actually visiting your website.
**Video transcription pick up where meta descriptions and video tags fail to offer more detail. **Transcripts are a textual representation of the spoken content in video. Search engines can’t watch a video or listen to audio, but they do crawl text and use text for indexing purpose. Adding transcription to embeded videos provides much more crawlable content to search engines, allowing them to understand video content on a deep level, increasing not only your keyword density, but also your keyword diversity (for Google to find and rank).
About this : pages that contain more than <a href="http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27698/2-million-blog-posts-are-written-every-day-heres-how-you-can-stand-out" rel="nofollow ugc">2,000 words are more likely to appear in the top ten search results on Google</a>, so transcriptions from slightly longer videos stand a great chance of getting you noticed.
Also, if video transcriptions benefit rankings, they will also benefit your traffic. The higher up your target keywords are in Google, the closer to position one, which drives more traffic and clicks to your landing pages and content. A higher ranking will generate more traffic, and increased traffic drives higher rankings. It’s all intertwined.
About this : Video transcription can be very impactful for websites. David Schneider, writing for SearchEnginePeople, noted that the radio show This American Life puts <a href="http://www.3playmedia.com/customers/case-studies/this-american-life/" rel="nofollow ugc">6.68% of their search engine traffic down to their transcripts</a> — a healthy audience return for transcribing existing content. Another study by Liveclicker compared 37 web pages before and after adding transcripts. Pages with transcripts earned on average 16% more revenue than they did before transcripts were added.
Video transcription will help you lower bounce rate. Because putting video transcripts on your website will increase engagement and widen your audience, it’s pretty self-explanatory why your bounce rates would shrink and the average time on page would increase. Transcription provides more content for a customer to consume.
The countless benefits of video transcription for SEO and your customers are undeniable. Using VidSEO plugin will not only boost the health of your site, but it will also make for a much better user experience.
Transcripts of your video content can be the perfect starting place for creating derivative works to sprinkle around and grow your SEO. Transcripts could provide much more information than what’s currently said on video (statistics, key quotes, tips,…). You can also Extract valuable points from your transcript for use in shareable social graphics, link-building, or publishing topical blog posts.
PS: Pagup recommends <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/" rel="ugc">Site kit by Google</a> plugin for insights & SEO performance.

VidSEO | WordPress Video SEO embedder with transcripts (Youtube & Vimeo)

Many people think primarily about top SEO, okay. But if you use tools like this, you kill two birds with one stone. Good SEO values and better accessibility for people who can't hear the video. Actually one more reason to use this. 

Great for SEO and Accessibility

Vidseo plugin allows to embed your videos (Youtube, Vimeo, …) with transcription to boost your website’s SEO and get better Google Search rankings.

AI-Ready & LLM-Optimized WordPress Robots.txt (+ Sitemaps) – Boost SEO, Traffic & AI Rankings vs VidSEO | WordPress Video SEO embedder with transcripts (Youtube & Vimeo)