ryanholder
commented
12 years ago Took the following from a site on robots.txt
Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.
It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots. The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.
There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt:
robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don't want robots to use. So don't try to use /robots.txt to hide information.
More info available here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Some of the analytics reports have crept into the google index - see the following search:
which returns 2 results on 4 April 2012:
We need the appropriate robots.txt to prevent any indexing happening