The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is a webmaster file used to give instructions to robots. The instructions help robots crawl web pages and index them for various websites. This REP is sometimes referred to as Robots.txt. They are placed at the top level of the web server directory to make them more useful. For example:robots.txtREP groups are used as a web standard that regulates bot actions and search engine indexing behavior. Between 1994 and 1997, the original REP defined bot behavior in the robots.txt file. In 1996, search engines supported additional REP X-robot tags. Search engines handled links whose value contained a "follow" using a rel-no follow microformat.
Disallow:
Excluding robot-specific protocol tags
URI, REP tags are applied to certain indexer tasks, and in some cases to nosnippet, noarchive and noodpquery engines or to a search query. For resources tagged with exclusion tags, search engines like Bing SERP australia mobile number list free listings display these external links as prohibited URLs. In addition to crawl directives, specific search engines will interpret REP tags differently. An example of this can be seen in how Bing sometimes lists external references in their SERPs as prohibited. Google takes the same listings and deletes the URL and ODP references in their SERPs. The idea is that X-Robots override directives that conflict with META elements.
Microformats
Particular HTML factors will override the page's settings in microformatted index directives. This programming method requires skills and a very keen knowledge of web servers and the HTTP protocol. An example of this protocol would be an X-Robot tag page with a particular link element that says follow and then rel-nofollow. Robots.txt indexers typically lack directives, but it is possible to set up URI group indexers that have a server-side scripting at the site level.
Pattern Matching
Webmasters can still use two different expressions to denote page exclusion. The two characters are the asterisk and the dollar sign. The asterisk denotes that it can represent any combination of characters. The dollar sign is to denote the end of the URL.