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This a very basic question, but I can't find a direct answer anywhere online. When searching for my website on google, sitemap.xml and robots.txt are returned as search results (amongst more useful results). To prevent this should I add the following lines to robots.txt?:
Disallow: /sitemap.xml
Disallow: /robots.txt
This won't stop search engines accessing the sitemap or robots file?
Also/Instead should I use google's URL removal tool?
850
Disallow directive in robots. txt. You can tell search engines not to access certain files, pages or sections of your website. This is done using the Disallow directive.
XML sitemaps can also contain additional information about each URL, in the form of meta data. And just like robots. txt, an XML sitemap is a must-have. It's not only important to make sure search engine bots can discover all of your pages, but also to help them understand the importance of your pages.
An XML sitemap shouldn't override robots. txt. If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup, you will see warnings on the sitemaps page that pages being blocked by robots are being submitted.
A sitemap is an XML file which contains a list of all of the webpages on your site as well as metadata (metadata being information that relates to each URL). In the same way as a robots. txt file works, a sitemap allows search engines to crawl through an index of all the webpages on your site in one place.
Robots.txt files should also include the location of another very important file: the XML Sitemap. This provides details of every page on your website that you want search engines to discover. In this post, we are going to show you how and where you should reference the XML sitemap in the robots.txt file.
An empty or inaccessible robots.txt file may be perceived by search engines as permission to crawl the entire site. In order to be processed successfully, the robots.txt file must return the 200 OK HTTP response status code. Let’s dissect the main symbols contained in the file and find out what each one means.
This is why robots.txt misconfigurations are extremely common—even amongst experienced SEO professionals. New to technical SEO? Check out our What is a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your site. Primarily, it lists all the content you want to lock away from search engines like Google.
Paste a URL into Google’s URL Inspection tool in Search Console. If it’s blocked by robots.txt, you should see something like this: This means that at least one of the URLs in your submitted sitemap (s) are blocked by robots.txt.
you won't stop the crawler from indexing robots.txt because its a chicken and the egg situation, however, if you aren't specifying google and other search engines to look directly at the sitemap, you could lose some indexing weight from denying your sitemap.xml. Is there a particular reason why you would want to not have users be able to see the sitemap? I actually do this which is specific just for the google crawler:
Allow: /
# Sitemap
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
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