# It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. # Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds: User-agent: * Disallow: / # # The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots. # # The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site. # # There are two important considerations when using /robots.txt: # robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention. # the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don't want robots to use. # So don't try to use /robots.txt to hide information.