Robots.txt lists items that (well behaved) index engines (search bots, web crawlers, etc...) should not request.

See also:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html
The Format
The format and semantics of the "/robots.txt" file are as follows:
The file consists of one or more records separated by one or more blank lines (terminated by CR,CR/NL, or NL). Each record contains lines of the form "<field>:<optionalspace><value><optionalspace>". The field name is case insensitive.

Comments can be included in file using UNIX bourne shell conventions: the '#' character is used to indicate that preceding space (if any) and the remainder of the line up to the line termination is discarded. Lines containing only a comment are discarded completely, and therefore do not indicate a record boundary.

The record starts with one or more User-agent lines, followed by one or more Disallow lines, as detailed below. Unrecognised headers are ignored.

User-agent

The value of this field is the name of the robot the record is describing access policy for.
If more than one User-agent field is present the record describes an identical access policy for more than one robot. At least one field needs to be present per record.

The robot should be liberal in interpreting this field. A case insensitive substring match of the name without version information is recommended.

If the value is '*', the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not matched any of the other records. It is not allowed to have multiple such records in the "/robots.txt" file.

Disallow

The value of this field specifies a partial URL that is not to be visited. This can be a full path, or a partial path; any URL that starts with this value will not be retrieved. For example, Disallow: /help disallows both /help.html and /help/index.html, whereas Disallow: /help/ would disallow /help/index.html but allow /help.html.
Any empty value, indicates that all URLs can be retrieved. At least one Disallow field needs to be present in a record.

The presence of an empty "/robots.txt" file has no explicit associated semantics, it will be treated as if it was not present, i.e. all robots will consider themselves welcome.

Examples
The following example "/robots.txt" file specifies that no robots should visit any URL starting with "/cyberworld/map/" or "/tmp/", or /foo.html:
```
# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cyberworld/map/ # This is an infinite virtual URL space
Disallow: /tmp/ # these will soon disappear
Disallow: /foo.html
```
This example "/robots.txt" file specifies that no robots should visit any URL starting with "/cyberworld/map/", except the robot called "cybermapper":
```
# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cyberworld/map/ # This is an infinite virtual URL space

# Cybermapper knows where to go.
User-agent: cybermapper
Disallow:
```
This example indicates that no robots should visit this site further:
```
# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```

Code:

Robots.txt lists items that (well behaved) index engines (search bots, web crawlers, etc...) should not request.

The Format

Examples