How can changes in robots.txt file affect my website's SEO ranking?

[smilesoulthread]

Hi! I have a site audit run my website monthly in regards to SEO to detect any issues. Today I received an email that stated the below:

“Here is the update for your Site Audit campaign. We have detected that your robots.txt file has been changed. A robots.txt file is used to instruct search engines what content on your website they should crawl. Even a minor change to this file may negatively affect your website’s indexability. Unplanned and ill-considered updates may dramatically damage your website’s rankings.”

I’ve tried to google this, and read into it more and I am completely lost. Any suggestion (I’ve also included a few screenshots)?

Website: www.smilesoulthreads.com

Thanks - Mindy

[demib]

I am not sure if Shopify made changes to the robots.txt file. Generally they do automate this. There is also now an option for each merchant to change it via liquid but I doubt this was done on your site.

You should not be worried about the 3 changes made. It basically just tell all and the Ahrefs site audit bot that it is OK to crawl the specified downloads folders.

[smilesoulthread]

Thank you for your help! Much appreciated