The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) — better known as robots.txt — allows website owners to exclude web crawlers and other automatic clients from accessing a site. “One of the most basic and critical ...

That blocks all search engines, including Google, MSN, Yahoo, and so on, from indexing any files at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Web site. (Here's some background on the ...

Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” talks about how to set up your newly created robots.txt file. Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + ...

Columnist Glenn Gabe shares his troubleshooting process for identifying issues with robots.txt that led to a long, slow drop in traffic over time. I’ve written many times in the past about how ...

Shopify stores are now able to edit their robots.txt file, which gives owners more control over how search engines crawl their site. Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO, broke the news this evening on Twitter ...

In the latest episode of Ask Google Webmasters, Google’s John Mueller goes over whether or not it’s okay to block special files in robots.txt. Google’s John Mueller answers a question about using ...

Do you use a CDN for some or all of your website and you want to manage just one robots.txt file, instead of both the CDN's robots.txt file and your main site's robots.txt file? Gary Illyes from ...

We had a slew of tweets triggered by Gary Illyes of Google and then followed up by John Mueller of Google around robots.txt and XML sitemap files ranking in Google. In short, if they rank for normal ...

Jeremiah Andrick cautions against the practice of having dynamic robots.txt files, or using them to help manage server load as the engines come crawling throughout the day. "You may perceive a benefit ...

This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft Live Search is finally now supporting sitemaps via autodiscovery. Microsoft will only use your sitemaps file if it is listed in ...