No, this article is not about one of those increasingly popular television shows that feature large metallic automatons bashing each other into submission with heavy, spinning, pointy things. Rather, it is a hands-on look at ways in which Webmasters can control Search Engine Spiders visiting their sites:
As is the case with all such articles, I must begin with my usual 'I am not a techno-geek, so take all of this advice with a big grain of salt, and use these techniques at your own risk' disclaimer. Having said that, this is an inside look at an often misunderstood application: the 'robots.txt' file. This is a simple text document that can help keep surfers from finding and directly entering your protected members area as well as other 'sensitive' areas of your site, and help focus attention on those parts of your site that need it and are prepared to handle it.
To make this easier to understand, consider many of the search results listings you've seen. Oftentimes the pages that you are directed to are not the site's home pages, but often 'inside' pages that can easily be taken out of context — or even out of framesets, hampering navigation and the natural 'flow' of information that the site's designer intended. Free site owners, for one example, do not really want people hitting their galleries directly, bypassing their warning pages, FPAs and other marketing tools; yet without specific instructions to the contrary, SE spiders are more than happy to provide direct links to these areas. These 'awkward' results can be avoided and manipulated through the use of the robots.txt file.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol
The mechanics of spider manipulation are carried out through the "Robots Exclusion Protocol," which allows Webmasters to tell visiting robots which areas of the site they should, and should not, visit and index. When a spider enters a site, the first thing it does is check the root directory for the robots.txt file. If it finds this file, it will attempt to follow the instructions included in it. If it doesn't find this file, it will have its way with your site, according to the parameters of the spider's individual programming.
It is vitally important that this robots.txt file be placed in your domain's root directory, i.e.: http://pornworks.com/robots.txt and should not be placed in any other sub-directory, such as http://pornworks.com/galleries/robots.txt — since it (unlike .htaccess files) won't work there because the robot simply won't look for it there, or obey it even if it finds this file outside your site's domain root directory. While I won't promise you this, that appears to mean that free-hosted and other sites that are not on their own domain will not be able to use this technique.
These non-domain sites do have an available option, however, in the use of the robots META tag. While not universally accepted, its use by spiders is now quite commonplace, and provides an alternative for those without domain root access. Here's the code:
META name="robots" content="index,follow">
META name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
META name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
META name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
These four META tags illustrate the possibilities, and tell the spider whether or not to index the page this tag appears on, and whether or not to follow any links it finds on the page that this tag appears on. Of these four examples, only one should be used, and placed within the document's HEAD /HEAD tag. While some Search Engines may recognize additional parameters within these tags, the listed examples detail the most commonly accepted values. For those site's with domain root access, a simple robots.txt file is formatted thusly (but should be modified to suit your site's individual needs and directory structure):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /htsdata/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
In the above example, all robots are instructed to follow the file's instructions, as indicated by the "User-agent: *" wildcard. More advanced files could tailor the robot's actions according to its source, for example, individual spiders could be limited to those pages that are specifically optimized for the Search Engine that sent them, a subject well beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps the subject of a future follow-up.
Back to the above example, the 'Disallow:' command tells the robot not to enter or index the contents of the directories that follow this command. Each listing must be on a separate line, is case-sensitive, and cannot contain blank spaces. The rest of the site is now free for the robot to explore and index.
I hope this brief tutorial helps you to understand how robots interact with your site, and allows you to gain a degree of control over their actions. If you have any questions or comments about these techniques, click on the link below. ~ Stephen
