by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
When I first started writing my first website, I did not really think that I would ever have any reason why I would want to create a robots.txt file. After all, did I not want search engine robots to spider and thus index every document in my site? Yet today, all my sites, including thesitewizard.com, have a robots.txt file in their root directory. This article explains why you might also want to include a Robots.txt file on your sites, how you can do so, and notes some common mistakes made by new webmasters with regards the ROBOTS.TXT file.
For those new to the robots.txt file, it is merely a text file implementing what is known as the Standard for Robot Exclusion. The file is placed in the main directory of a website that advises spiders and other robots which directories or files they should not access. The file is purely advisory - not all spiders bother to read it let alone heed it. However, most, if not all, the spiders sent by the major search engines to index your site will read it and take cognizance of the rules contained within the file.

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