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Creating a Robots.txt file

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.

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.

The protocol, however, 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.

Here are a few examples:

This example allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard "*" specifies all robots and the Disallow is blank:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This example keeps all robots out because the Disallow points to the root directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The next is an example that tells all crawlers not to enter into four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

This example tells a specific crawler not to enter one specific directory:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /private/

Example that tells all crawlers not to enter one specific file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

Note that all other files in the specified directory will be processed.

Example demonstrating how comments can be used - everything after the number sign (#) will be ignored by the robot:

# Comments appear after the "#" symbol at the start of a line, or after a directive
User-agent: * # match all bots
Disallow: / # keep them out