Robots.txt

Can we give it another name

[bilalseo]

Hello
One of my dear fellow has given robots.txt file another name like robetistic.txt. Could you please explain me whether it is good or a bad practice to name a robots.txt file with another name? Or, if it is valid (giving another name), what about Google then? will google crawl the new name of robots.txt.
thanks,
Bilal

[sem4u]

The filename must be called robots.txt to be crawled by Google and other search engines. Copy the content of the other file to robots.txt and delete the other one.

[phranque]

according to The Robots Exclusion Protocol:
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html [robotstxt.org]
the url is:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

you can also see "Examples of valid robots.txt URLs" in the Google Developers Robots.txt Specifications:
http://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt [developers.google.com]

[lucy24]

You can silently rewrite from robots.txt to anyname.anyextension. Some people hereabouts do this as part of sneakily serving up a UA-specific robots.txt. But the URL has to be hostname/robots.txt.

[Samizdata]

sneakily serving up a UA-specific robots.txt

It is not sneaky at all.

It is a simple server configuration.

No bots are misled or otherwise harmed in the process.

...

[lucy24]

We have differing definitions of the word "sneaky". In my lexicon, anything involving a rewrite is sneaky. Not necessarily bad, but undeniably hidden and behind-the-scenes.

[Samizdata]

undeniably hidden and behind-the-scenes

What, like the Apache configuration, the PHP code, and so much else?

Serving different responses to different user-agents is perfectly normal and reasonable.

But nobody likes a sneak.

...

[bilalseo]

thanks guys for helping me out.. thanks for you help.. God bless you all.. Sorry for late reply, actually got ill for long. Thanks again dudes