Robots.txt is commonly referred to as the robot exclusion protocol. This refers to the act of including a robots.txt file in a web directory, with the purpose of telling web crawlers and search engines not to index certain areas of a web site.
This method is not fool-proof, however, and should not be considered a way to securitize a website. For instance, most search engines and crawlers will abide by the robots.txt file on a web server- but there are no rules saying that they can’t. This means that sensitive data can still be available to public searching, and that better security should be implemented.
Robots.txt is mainly used for editing and creating code or designing web sites that creators do not wish to make public yet. This is also an application of search engine optimization. If a website owner were to upload only part of a page, it would most likely suffer a negative effect of SEO, rather than what a full page of complete information would.
Lastly, this method is great for those who are worried about bandwidth. Bandwidth can be very costly to website owners, and web crawlers or search engines use a lot of bandwidth in indexing pages of a webpage. To prevent a web crawler from crawling a site too frequently, this is one of the best solutions to save bandwidth- although less traffic will most likely result from search engines.
Overall, there many uses for the robots.txt file. In order to use the protocol, certain commands and syntaxes must be followed. Once this is learned, a webmaster can enjoy the benefits of having a working robots.txt file to serve in its many applications- from saving bandwidth to allowing for a little more time for changes or edits to a webpage before it goes public.
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