time until a new robots rule gets acknowledged?

[httpwebwitch]

I noticed this afternoon that Googlebot is visiting URLs that it shouldn't visit. So I added those URLs to the robots.txt at 2:30pm

at 3:30pm Googlebot is still requesting those pages.

how long until G takes another look at my robots.txt? Or do I need to prompt it somehow? Hey G-bot, please take a look at my robots.txt, I changed it... please stop crawling...

I could put some cloaking rules in my .htaccess, but that seems heavyhanded IMHO

Anyone have experiences to share?

[g1smd]

I always change robots.txt at least 48 hours before the URLs that are not meant to be accessed go live. That's because Google might check the robots.txt file for changes only a few times per week.

The robots.txt disallow says to not spider the pages. The URLs can still appear as URL-only entries in SERPs.

If you don't want anything to appear in the search results, not even a URL-only entry, then you are better off using the meta robots noindex tag instead. That takes effect immediately the page is spidered.

[phranque]

check your server access logs