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The Proper Way To Use The robots.txt File
When optimizing your web site most webmasters don't consider using the robots.txt file.This is a very important file for your site. It let the spiders and crawlers know what they can and can not index. This is helpful in keeping them out of folders that you do not want index like the admin or stats folder.
Here is a list of variables that you can include in a robot.txt file and there meaning:
1) User-agent: In this field you can specify a specific robot to describe access policy for or a "*" for all robots more explained in example.
2) Disallow: In the field you specify the files and folders not to include in the crawl.
3) The # is to represent comments
Here are some examples of a robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The above would let all spiders index all content.
Here another example
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
The above would block all spiders from indexing the cgi-bin directory.
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin.php
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /stats/
In the above example googlebot can index everything while all other spiders can not index admin.php, cgi-bin, admin, and stats directory. Notice that you can block single files like admin.php.
About The Author
Jimmy Whisenhunt is the webmaster at VIP Enterprises http://www.vipenterprises.org.
vipenter@vipenterprises.org
Previously on SearchEngineChannel
- How Search Engines Impact Online Sales
- Log File Analysis and SEO
- The Power Of The "Niche" - Choosing Keywords People Actually Use
- Is New MSN Search More Precise? Just Ask Google
- 13 Steps to Increasing Your Link Luck
- How to Design a Website for the Search Engines
- An ethical alternative to "doorway pages"
- How to Submit Your Site to Search Engines
- How to reach #1 in Yahoo! Part 2
- The SEO Journey
