Introduction This is a very basic tutorial about robots.txt files. Alot of people on hackthis.co.uk have trouble with it, so i'm gonna do a tutorial here for entry level hackers all over the web. So lets get started. Background Search engines such as "Google" or "Yahoo" find the websites which they ultimately find for you using something called a "search bot" or "web crawler". It searches the web in search of websites basically, and so search engines use them to index their sites. How This Is Related to Hacking If a website has pages which it doesn't want search engines to find, then it can index the sites that search bots are excluded from in a ".txt" file. This is called a "robots.txt". The pages indexed in a "robots.txt" page could potentially contain information concerning usernames, passwords, personal details etc. (the information would probably be encrypted, but this isn't a decryption tutorial :p). So basically, if we find the robots.txt file, then we find a list of secret webpages for a particular site. The best bit is, is that there can only be one "robots.txt" fine for each website. So say it was for go4expert. The URL would be - http://www.go4expert.com/robots.txt The "robots.txt" would look a bit like this: Code: User-agent: * Disallow: / The "/" tells the search robots to ignore any page on this website. However it could look like this: Code: User-agent: * Disallow: uernamespasswords.txt This would mean that search engines ignore just one page... Summary: And Further Reading robotstxt.org - all about "robots.txt" files. hackthis.co.uk - a great website to learn hacking in a legal, user friendly enviroment. Main Level 7 is all about "robots.txt". Remember guys: KEEP IT LEGAL DISCLAIMER - I WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS OF ANYONE WHO READS THIS TUTORIAL. IT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Good to see your first Article but I would have preferred this to be in Search Engines and so moved to Search Engine with a permanent redirect in Hacking forum as well.
anywasy, even if it is not suppose to be posted here.......i think some newbie webmasters should also know this.......may be they can prevent to hack their secure the pages at least in this way.
Ha, i'm a bit of a newbie webmaster myself. I haven't bothered to sort out security yet. I think i'll wait till its finished. So if you guys want to hack someone - hack me!!! :p
well that's good for you. when i started in internet, i did not know this. I only came to know of all this stuff after reading and participating in forums like this. Even, i am still learning day by day.
Great info on robots.txt file. It is definently a tool that a lot of people don't utilise. Most likely its because they are not aware of it. Great post!
We Use Robots Tag on all pages that we want indexed for the website. This will instruct the robots to crawl the page of the website. Robot tag is implemented in following way: <meta name="robots" content="index" />
Robots.txt file is a special text file that is always located in your Web server's root directory. Robots.txt file contains restrictions for Web Spiders, telling them where they have permission to search. A Robots.txt is like defining rules for search engine spiders (robots) what to follow and what not to. It should be noted that Web Robots are not required to respect Robots.txt files, but most well written Web Spiders follow the rules you define.