Robots Exclusion Standard
From Freepedia
The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent well-behaved web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.
The robots.txt protocol is purely advisory, and relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many web site administrators have been caught out trying to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world. However the file is necessarily publicly available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.
The robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.
Alternatives
robots.txt is older and more widely accepted, but there are other methods (which can be used together with robots.txt) that allow greater control, like disabling indexing of images only or disabling archiving of page contents.
HTML meta tags that may be used to exclude robots according to the contents of web pages. Again, this is purely advisory, and also relies on the cooperation of the robot programs. For example:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
between the <head> and </head> tags, tells search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN to exclude this page in its index and not to follow any links on this page for further possible indexing.
See also
External links
- Fleiner.com - 'How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away'
- ILoveJackDaniels.com - 'robots.txt File' (tutorial on how and why to add a robots.txt file to websites, July 19, 2004)
- Kloth.net - 'List of Bad Bots: A short list of bad spiders and nasty bots seen on my different web sites' (including those that violate the robots exclusion standard)
- Laffey.tv - 'How To: Serving up default favicon.ico and robots.txt files with apache'
- Motoricera.info - 'Robots.txt Checker' (validates robots.txt files and gives optimization tips)
- Robotstxt.org - 'A Standard for Robot Exclusion'
- Robotstxt.org - 'Robots Exclusion'
- SearchingineWorld.com - 'Robots.txt Validator' (validates robots.txt files on websites)
- SearchEngineWorld.com - 'Robots.txt Tutorial'
- Yellowpipe.com - 'Robots.txt Online Generator'
