Robots.txt

To use... or not to use? That is the question

[panic]

I allow all content on my site to be crawled. With that said, should I simply not use robots.txt, or have one with the following lines :

user-agent: *
allow: *

Would having the latter of the two improve the number of pages crawled by the spiders?

-panic

[jimbeetle]

Make it even easier and just through in an empty robots.txt. No muss, no fuss, no confusion, no 404s.

[tedster]

The robots.txt protocol only allows for "disallow:" statements (not allow: statements) and wildcards don't belong in the disallow.

What you need if you want to allow all spiders to roam your site without restriction is:

user-agent: *
disallow:

[Mohamed_E]

The most logical approach is not to have one; the only function of that file is to disallow access (hence the syntax as explained by tedster).

The only downside is that you will get lots of 404s in your log files. Should you want to eliminate them then use an empty file as suggested by jimbeetle.

[Robert Charlton]

Extended discussion here...

[webmasterworld.com...]
Google and having *no* robots.txt file
could this be hurting your site?

[panic]

I noticed more of my pages are getting indexed now that I'm using a robots.txt that allows everything to be crawled.

-p