logs and robots.txt

[tyrojds]

i have searched for an answer to this, however, perhaps because the discussions of robots.txt are always too technical for me, no luck.

in my logs "/robots.txt" comes up under "documents not found." my site is indexed so i'm wondering what this means and if i should worry about this. thanks, and any comments must be at the "info for idiots" level.

[wilderness]

tyrojds,
Are you aware if your website contains a robots. txt in the main/root folder?

It is not absolutely necessary to have a robots. The good spiders look for it out of protocol and and courtesy.
The majority of the bad guys aren't going to read it anyway.

Webmaster World encourages copying of their own robots should you desire something basic to get you rolling.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[weesnich]

In robots.txt you can give directives, which areas of your site wellbehaving bots should not visit. You can as well suggest, that certain robots sould not read and index your pages.
Bots from respected owners i.E. googlebot will read this file and follow your restrictions, others will not.

You do not need to have such a file if you have no guidelines for the robots visiting your site. Not having this file does not exclude you from searchengines.

[jdMorgan]

tyrojds,

If you do not wish to place any restrictions on robots, you can still prevent the 404-Not Found errors by uploading a blank text file named robots.txt to your web root directory.

Jim

[tyrojds]

i knew i could count on great info, thanks.

wilderness - would i just paste that stuff at the link you sent somewhere onto my index's html page?

[jdMorgan]

tyrojds,

No. You must create a text file on your server in the same directory as your index page called "robots.txt"! It can be blank (just to stop the 404's you see), or it can contain directives such as the ones you see in the page using wilderness' link.

You might want to read this robots.txt tutorial [robotstxt.org] for more info.

Jim

[wilderness]

Hey Jim,
How goes it?

tyrojds, the link I provided to the Webmaster World robots previosuly you can open and select SAVE AS with your browser and then save it in your wesbite root folder.

Then later open with any text editor and remove the Top portion which belongs to Webamster World.

BTW you might also want to take a look at changing the closing lines for folder exclusions. Your site structure likely don't match Webamster World's.
Add in any of your own folders your desire excluded from robot traffic.
Save the file and then upload into your websites root folder.

You should also read the link Jim provided to understand the procedures involved in creating your own robots for future use.

Don