: Do you need to add 301 redirect rules into robots.txt for search engines when you specify them in .htaccess? Do I need to add 301 redirects to the robots.txt file? I will be adding the redirects

@Eichhorn148

To answer your question: no, no any redirection rules in the robots.txt file. Just because it is the wrong place for them. I would highly recommend to read standard specification of robots.txt here and there.


Robots.txt is for bots, crawlers, spiders, coming automatically to read and save the content of your pages.
Redirection rules are for server, to handle any/all requests, coming from human or software.


There is an approach, called cloacking, which was used by some not-so-white SEOs years ago. This approach is about special setup in the server configuration (like your htaccess) to recognize search engine bots by their user agents and redirect them to special location. According to this the human visitors are redirected to another special locations too.

The goal of this approach was: search engines get pages, which are SEO-optimized in such grade, that they are no longer comfortable to be used by human. Human visitors get served not-so-optimized pages, which however can be offhand used.

By now Google is very good able to recognize and penalize such behavior - cloacking violates Google's ToS.

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