Question: What is the difference between a sitemap and a robots.txt file?

Both sitemaps and robots.txt files are tools used in SEO to communicate with search engines, but they serve very different purposes.

Sitemap:

A sitemap is essentially a map of your website that leads Google or other search engines to all your important pages. Sitemaps can be created in XML or HTML format. An XML sitemap is a structured document that helps search engine bots understand the content of your site while an HTML sitemap helps users navigate your site.

Example of a basic XML sitemap entry:

<url>
  <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

Robots.txt:

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site. It is a way of requesting search engines to not index certain parts of your website. This file lives at the root directory of your site.

Example of a basic robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /~joe/

In summary, while both are integral parts of an effective SEO strategy, a sitemap is more about guiding search engines to your important pages, whereas a robots.txt file is about blocking search engine bots from the sections you don't want indexed.