User Agent is potentially a term that you haven’t heard before, however learning and understanding it is incredibly important to learn as many marketers who wear a black hat may choose to abuse this mechanic to increase their ranking on Google. A user agent is a string that communicates with a web server to identify your browser and operating system. This can used for many reason but one of the most common uses is for optimization and to make your site more user friendly for users on phone or computer.
User Agents are also really useful for eliminating bots. Since most bots and other inorganic web searchers use a specific user agent, it is possible and really helpful to prevent access to your website by specifically banning them in the robots.txt file in the root of your website. This text file uses a very simple syntax that either allows or denies access to certain bots. Here is a sample of robots.txt…
User-agent: * Allow: / User-agent: unwantedbot Disallow: / Sitemap: https://example.com/home
While the robots.txt file can be used for good as demonstrated above, it could also be used in a way to improve ranking on Google in an unethical manner. Since you are able to show different pages to bots, you could program your site in a way where it shows a good, content filled page to Google’s web crawler, but serve a horrible, malware-ridden site to the actual users who visit your site.
In summary, the use of a robots.txt file is very much encouraged! It is an effective way of preventing bots and other unwanted visitors to your website, however it can also be used in unethical ways to both cheat your way to the top of Google, and provide spammy content to those who have genuine interest in the proposed content on your site.
~ Rob
SOURCE: https://salestube.tech/blog/what-is-user-agent-importance-of-user-agent-in-seo
2 Responses
I love the picture you included haha! Nice post.
I haven’t heard of user agents before. This was really interesting to hear about and see how they can be useful on a sight, very good to know!