Help: Someone is emailing me claiming there's a problem with my Robots.txt?

[ecom1234]

I have a solicitor emailing me about my site. They're claiming that there's a "critical issue" with my site; supposedly that my checkout pages are disallowed and that's causing "serious errors" and could be hurting my conversions.

They included a link to my site ending in "/robots.txt" and some screenshots of code, but I am not going to click on any of these items since I don't know the sender.

I'm not planning to hire this person (or anyone else at this point), but can anyone please explain to me what this means and if it's even something I should address/be worried about?

I looked at my site's checkout and everything seems to be working just fine.

Thank you

[tim · Accepted solution]

Every Shopify site has robots.txt file. 

By default, this file prevents search engines from indexing a bunch of pages on your site. Usually you would not want them indexed anyway.

Here is the excerpt:

Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkouts/
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /23104437/checkouts
Disallow: /23104437/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account

This means that we do not want, say, Google to try and index your admin pages (need to have login and password anyway);

cart page also should not be indexed (it will always be empty cart for search engines, and what's the benefit of indexing cart pages anyway);

also order pages and checkout pages -- usually would need login and password anyway, so just a wasted search budget on something you would not want indexed...

There is more rules like these, all of them has good reason behind them.

People who say that disallowing indexing of checkout pages will hurt your SEO are either have no idea or trying to scam you.

Just google https://www.google.com/search?q=do+i+need+to+index+my+checkout+pages 

[ecom1234]

That's really helpful, thank you so much! I was wondering why you'd even want/need to index the checkout page anyway.