Why should you guide robots to Index the Right Pages?
Important and valuable pages will be crawled every time Google visits your website if you guide the robot. Other pages such as the “terms and conditions” on your website are not important to search engines.
Search engine bots can ignore these Pages that do not need a high position in search engines. Indexing time spent on these pages should be spent on the most important pages on your site.
There are several different ways to guide Googlebot to the correct pages:
1.- Use a good robots.txt file and the noindex meta tag
Robots.txt is the name of a text file available at www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. This tells search engines which parts of your website should be accessible.
You must establish rules for not allowing access to all types of files, folders and pages that you do not want indexed. Search engine robots check the robots.txt file before indexing the pages of a website.
A good robots.txt file makes sure that unimportant pages are not indexed. Some examples can be found here.
La noindex meta tag is another way to exclude individual pages from the index. In general, you don't need this tag if you have a good robots.txt file.
2.- Make sure all the links work
Search engine robots follow the links found on your web pages. Broken links are a sign of a low-quality site. You don't want Googlebot wasting time crawling links to non-existent pages on your site. You can check the links on your site with audit tools.
3.- Improve your web structure
A good structure of your website with clearly categorized content increases the likelihood that Googlebot and other search engine robots will find the important pages on your site.
The most important pages on your site should be available in just a few clicks. Site audit tools show when it takes many clicks to reach pages on your site and help you identify them so you can correct them.
If you do the things above, Google will index the correct pages on your site. The number of pages indexed is not as important as the quality of the pages indexed. If the right web pages are found for the right keywords, you will get many more sales.