The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is unrelated to, but can be used in conjunction with, Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.
If a site owner wishes to give instructions to web robots he must place a text file called robots.txt to the root of the web site hierarchy (e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt). This text file should contain the instructions in a specific format (see examples below). Robots that are programmed to follow the instructions try to fetch this file and read the instructions before fetching any other file from the web site. If this file doesn't exist web robots assume that the web owner wishes to provide no specific instructions.
A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.
For websites with multiple subdomains, each subdomain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com would not apply to a.example.com.
Disadvantages
The protocol is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of a site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Some web site administrators have tried to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world, but the file is necessarily publicly available and its content is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.
There is no official standards body or RFC for the robots.txt protocol. It was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). 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 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.
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