Glossary

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they may or may not crawl.

Robots.txt is a plain-text file at your domain root that gives crawl directives to bots. It controls crawling, not indexing, and is used to keep crawlers out of low-value or private sections.

Example

A site disallows /cart and /search in robots.txt so crawlers spend time on content pages instead.