Robots.txt is a text file that is placed in the root directory of a website to communicate with web robots and search engines about which pages on the website should not be crawled or indexed. The file specifies rules for web robots, such as search engine bots, on how to interact with the website.
The robots.txt file is used to prevent web robots from crawling certain pages or sections of a website that should not be accessed or indexed. This can include pages that contain confidential or sensitive information, or pages that are not intended for public viewing. The file can also be used to specify which pages or sections of a website should be crawled more frequently or to specify the rate at which pages should be crawled.
Here is an example of a simple robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private
Disallow: /sensitive-information
Allow: /public-page
In this example, the User-agent field specifies that the rules apply to all web robots, regardless of their user-agent string. The Disallow fields specify the URLs of the pages or sections of the website that should not be crawled or indexed. The Allow field specifies a page or section of the website that should be crawled and indexed.
It’s important to note that while the robots.txt file provides a way to communicate with web robots and search engines, it is not a guarantee that they will abide by the rules specified in the file. Some web robots may ignore the rules or interpret them differently, so it’s important to implement other security measures to protect sensitive information on your website.
