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.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

ChatGPT

OpenAI Working On ChatGPT Tools For Business For Analytics & Citations

Nov 6, 2026 - 10:32 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 6, 2026

Nov 6, 2026 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Scaled Content Abuse From Facebook, ChatGPT Search 20% Of Google & More SEO, PPC & Local

Nov 6, 2026 - 8:01 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Manage Offers Help Document

Nov 6, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google

Google AI Mode Asking Searchers To Continue With This Search

Nov 6, 2026 - 7:42 am
Google

Google Shopping Dominating The European Product Search Results

Nov 6, 2026 - 7:41 am
Previous Story: Google Places Bulk Import Not Working