Get exclusive CAP network offers from top brands

View CAP Offers

Unvalidated Robots.Txt Risks Google Banishment

splinterfree asked 4 years ago
i subscribe to webpronews and received this article…kinda interesting:



Unvalidated Robots.Txt Risks Google Banishment
David A. Utter | Staff Writer

The web crawling Googlebot may find a forgotten line in robots.txt
that causes it to de-index a site from the search engine.

Webmasters welcome being dropped out of Google about as much as
they enjoy flossing with barbed wire. Making it easier for Google
to do that would be anathema to being a webmaster. Why willingly
exclude one’s site from Google?

That could happen with an unvalidated robots.txt file. Robots.txt
allows webmasters to provide standing instructions to visiting
spiders, which contributes to having a site indexed faster and
more accurately.

Google has been considering new syntax to recognize within
robots.txt. The Sebastians-Pamphlets blog said Google confirmed
recognizing experimental syntax like Noindex in the robots.txt
file.

This poses a danger to webmasters who have not validated their
robots.txt. A line reading Noindex: / could lead to one’s site
being completely de-indexed.

The surname-less Sebastian recommended Google’s robots.txt
analyzer, part of Google’s Webmaster Tools, and only using
the Disallow, Allow, and Sitemaps crawler directives in the
Googlebot section of robots.txt.



not sure if this has any validity, but interesting none-the-less.

ps.

2 Answers
Inspiration answered 4 years ago
I got this email too but I do not use restrictions for the robots.txt (standard) file

I do not think I have a problem or do I ?

Regards
Rick

splinterfree answered 4 years ago
not really. the only reason i got it setup is because once my programmer forgot to put a password to the link exchange admin section, and then google bot went through all of them and in particular the delete link…

effectively this deleted all the links :roflmao: so now i just use it as back up in case my programmer goes incompetent for a short bit…