“ For affiliate marketers , robots . txt is strategic . Proper use ensures search engines prioritise crawling and indexing valuable pages ” subtleties in website content , amplifying the importance of robots . txt in directing their crawl patterns . For instance , if a model deems website content to be highly relevant to a query , but robots . txt file restricts access to this content , then it can lead to missed opportunities in search rankings .
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TRAFFIC
balancing act . It ’ s important to disallow sections that don ’ t contribute to SEO , like affiliate redirect URLs , while ensuring that affiliate product pages and articles remain crawlable . However , over-restriction can lead to loss of potential traffic , as search engines won ’ t index parts of the website that might have relevant content .
Case studies show a well-configured robots . txt can boost a website ’ s visibility . For instance , an ecommerce website may exclude pages with duplicate content , like printer-friendly versions , while ensuring product pages are crawlable . That said , the robots . txt directives are often a last resort when other SEO best practices fail , offering a simple way for search engine crawlers to prioritise important pages . Sometimes you may depend on third parties , like using a CDN with bot defence measures , such as Cloudflare , inadvertently creating many useless URL patterns for search engine crawlers . The robots . txt file , however , offers a solution . For Cloudflare , just add this snippet to your robots . txt :
User-Agent : * Disallow : / cdn-cgi /
This snippet prevents good bots like Googlebot from accessing Cloudflare bot challenge pages .
TRAINING LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
The advent of large language models , such as GPT-4 , Bard and Llama2 , has ushered in a new era for search engine algorithms . These large language models promise to understand context , intent and nuanced meanings of user queries as well as the website ’ s content . Although this promise has yet to be realised , technical SEO remains crucial for indexing content . Without technical SEO , including proper use of robots . txt , your affiliate website ’ s content may not be considered for these large language models and your visibility may suffer long term .
As these models become integral to search algorithms , their interaction with robots . txt grows in significance . These advanced algorithms can discern
“ For affiliate marketers , robots . txt is strategic . Proper use ensures search engines prioritise crawling and indexing valuable pages ” subtleties in website content , amplifying the importance of robots . txt in directing their crawl patterns . For instance , if a model deems website content to be highly relevant to a query , but robots . txt file restricts access to this content , then it can lead to missed opportunities in search rankings .
There is an ongoing discussion about source material for training commercial large language models . Copyright is not respected or attributed and personal information has leaked into large language models . Although a metatag solution to respect copyright and instruct large language models on content usage for training has been advocated , Google has thus far chosen robots . txt instead .
Following Google ’ s announcement , OpenAI , Meta and Google have all released new and / or updated existing user-agent strings while Bing has chosen to use existing metatags instead . Although these solutions don ’ t fully address copyright concerns , they are a step in the right direction .
Although robots . txt certainly offers a solution to opt out of training large language models , it does not actually tackle their usage or implementation . For instance , blocking Google-Extended in robots . txt from using your affiliate
28 • ISSUE 94 • iGB AFFILIATE LONDON 2024