The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), commonly known as robots.txt, has been a web standard since 1994 and remains a key tool for website optimization today. This simple yet powerful file helps control ...

Columnist Glenn Gabe shares his troubleshooting process for identifying issues with robots.txt that led to a long, slow drop in traffic over time. I’ve written many times in the past about how ...

Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” talks about how to set up your newly created robots.txt file. Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + ...

The Internet Archive has announced that going forward, it will no longer conform to directives given by robots.txt files. These files are predominantly used to advise search engines on which portions ...

When it comes to SEO, most people understand that a website must have content, “search engine friendly” site architecture/HTML, and meta data (title tags and meta descriptions). Another meta element, ...

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 ...

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 ...

That blocks all search engines, including Google, MSN, Yahoo, and so on, from indexing any files at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Web site. (Here's some background on the ...