crawl confusion

Understanding my hits log

[cardpro]

I'm trying to understand my hits log. What would this mean: crawl-66-249-64-6.googlebot.com - - [10/Mar/2005:23:02:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 148 "" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
crawl-66-249-64-6.googlebot.com - - [10/Mar/2005:23:02:18 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 19863 "" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Thanks for any help

[wruppert]

The first record means Google tried to get your robots.txt file, and did not find it - that is what the "404" means.

The second record is Google successfully getting whatever page is returned at "www.yourdomain.com" - your home page. That is what the "200" means.

The gory details of Apache logs can be found at [httpd.apache.org...]

[cardpro]

Thanks for the reply. By google not finding my robot.txt file, does that penalize my ranking?

[ThomasB]

cardpro, you have to name the file robots.txt - and no, you won't have a disadvantage by not having a robots.txt file

[sem4u]

If you save a blank notepad file, call it robots.txt and upload it to the root directory it will get rid of any further robots.txt 404 errors.