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 ...

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 ...

I have run into an interesting robots.txt situation several times over the years that can be tricky for site owners to figure out. After surfacing the problem, and discussing how to tackle the issue ...

Google’s John Mueller answers a question about using robots.txt to block special files, including .css and .htacess. This topic was discussed in some detail in the latest edition of the Ask Google ...

A website is a good way to promote your small business, as well as showcase your products and unique qualifications. If you manage a large website, you likely use a few subdomains and each subdomain ...

Apparently the Googlebot is failing to heed the "Keep Away!" that the robots.txt file is supposed to yell authoritatively. Rand mentioned something like this the other day, and critter over at SEW ...

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 ...

Effective September 1, Google will stop supporting unsupported and unpublished rules in the robots exclusive protocol, the company announced on the Google Webmaster blog. That means Google will no ...

One of the cornerstones of Google's business (and really, the web at large) is the robots.txt file that sites use to exclude some of their content from the search engine's web crawler, Googlebot. It ...

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 ...