Google Published Detailed Specifications on Robots.txt

Nov 26, 2010 - 8:28 am 3 by

Webmasters and SEOs have new reading material for this weekend. Google has published a very comprehensive and detailed Robots.txt Specifications, Robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header specifications and how to control crawling and indexing by GoogleBot.

There are two threads that I know of covering this new document. One is at WebmasterWorld and the other is at Google Webmaster Help.

Tedster said he learned at least one new thing from this new resource. He said:

Google will look for and obey an FTP robots.txt file located at ftp://example.com/robots.txt

PageOneResults added a highlight on:

Redirects will generally be followed until a valid result can be found (or a loop is recognized). We will follow a limited number of redirect hops (RFC 1945 for HTTP/1.0 allows up to 5 hops) and then stop and treat it as a 404.

What did you learn?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

 

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