goodroi - 1:58 pm on Dec 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

Robots.txt are also helpful in blocking the bots from indexing directories that contain scripts. If you have a very plain site that you would be ok with having the engines crawl everything than you do not need a robots.txt.

as for xml sitemaps, just because the engines say they would like you to do something doesn't mean you should do it. for good webmasters i see no benefit from xml sitemaps. but we should discuss that in a seperate thread ;)