How do i do a robot.txt

What does it do?

[youngkeen]

What is robot.txt.
I am confused i have been doing the site for a year now and have a feeling the reason my site is badly performing in the SE's is the robopt.txt has not been done.
Also what is the best way of making you sitemap as i have done an xml sitemap with a third party tool and dont think it is doing the right job.?
Any help much appreciated
Very keen, Youngkeen

[bateman_ap]

robots.txt is simply a text file that you place in the root of your web folder that gives instructions to spiders such as Googles Googlebot - [google.com...] or Yahoos Slurp - [help.yahoo.com...] what it can and can't crawl.

By default if you don't have a robots.txt it assumes everything on your site is freely crawable, if it is you don't have the need for a robots file. If however you don't want it crawling a certain page you can indicate this in the file.

This page has more details (hope it is ok to list, sure i have seen it here before)
[robotstxt.org...]

But to answer your quesion, the lack of a robots.txt file won't be hurting your rankings.

[zooloo]

At the top of this page there is a lonk named "Glossary"

Click that and look ofr robots.txt - click it.

There is a description and a link to the full spec.

zoo