A robots. txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google.

Commands can be set up to apply to specific robots according to their user-agent (such as 'Googlebot'), and the most common directive used within a robots. txt is a 'disallow', which tells the robot not to access a URL path. You can view a sites robots. txt in a browser, by simply adding /robots.

txt file is legal, but it is not a legally binding document. It is a widely accepted and standardized part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), which web crawlers and search engines use to follow website owner instructions about which parts of a site they can or cannot crawl.

The Robots Exclusion Standard was quickly embraced by the web community. Most major search engine crawlers adopted it, respecting the rules outlined in robots. txt files. While it's a voluntary protocol (bad bots can ignore it), the vast majority of web crawlers still abide by it.