What is robots.txt and why every Indian website needs it
The robots.txt file is the first thing Googlebot fetches when it visits your site. A misconfigured one can de-index your entire website — we have seen Indian eCommerce stores accidentally block Google for months because their developer copied a "Disallow: /" from staging.
Best-practice rules
Allow all crawlers by default. Explicitly disallow only admin, login, cart, checkout, search results and internal filter URLs. Always include a Sitemap directive — it speeds up indexation by 2–3× for new domains.
WordPress, Shopify and custom sites
WordPress generates a virtual robots.txt by default — replace it with one from this tool via Yoast or by uploading to your server root. Shopify auto-generates a solid robots.txt; you only need to edit it via theme.liquid. Custom React/Next.js sites should place robots.txt in /public.
Pair this with our Website Audit Tool to check if Google is actually crawling your important pages.