[FONT=Garamond, Garamond, serif]Hi all......[/FONT] [FONT=Garamond, Garamond, serif]As it is known to all that robots.txt file is use to specify how search engines should crawl your site's content.....but how much it is important to have it? Does it help in SEO?[/FONT]
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.
When a crawler comes to your site, it will look for a special file on your site, called robots.text tells the bot, which Web pages of your site should be indexed and which Web pages should be ignored.
It has nothing to do with your SEO plan and strategy. Since it can;t increase ranking, visitors or whatever. but wold you want your personal data becomes public or any valuable document present on the web? It helps you keep crawler keep at bay from those pages you don't want to be crawled.