How to Control Search Engine Robots
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Wouldn't it be nice to be able to leave some code in your web site to tell the search engine spider crawlers to make your site number one?
Unfortunately a robots.txt file or robots meta tag won't do that, but they can help the crawlers to index your site better and block out the unwanted ones.
First a little definition explaining:
Search Engine Spiders or Crawlers - A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.
A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.
Robots.txt - The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent well-behaved web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. 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 protocol is purely advisory, and relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many web site administrators have been caught out trying to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world. However the file is necessarily publicly available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.
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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