Apparently the Googlebot is failing to heed the "Keep Away!" that the robots.txt file is supposed to yell authoritatively. Rand mentioned something like this the other day, and critter over at SEW forums described the following when he started a thread asking "What's The Point of A Robots.txt File If Google Ignores It?"
I noticed today Google indexing my images folder, even though I explicity prevent ALL SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS from indexing that folder from various reasons. I have had this robots.txt file in the root of my site since the day it was launched and am quite annoyed and frustrated with Google for ignoring it and indexing the contents of the folder anyways.
Maybe we know now why Matt Cutts doesn't use one? :p
After assuring one member that the robots.txt was properly formatted, critter gets some further support is his assertion. I will be examining some log files over the next week to see for any such instances, and I'm sure we would all love to see more evidence of this in the thread.
Read about it and post your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.
See Rand’s post at SEOmoz Blog.
