Maintaining privacy of your website:

It is obvious that a website owner will worry about the privacy of his website. There are reasons for doing so. It has been seen often that someone within the organization is misusing the access to website. The hackers too, love to take advantage of every weakness in the privacy system of websites and cause damage to it. However, more than this, the search engine crawlers too cause trouble for the webmasters. It can be that you have a certain page included in your website, which you want to keep away from the search engine crawlers. In this regard, you can use “Robots.txt” which is sure to keep these crawlers away from these pages. Now if by reading this, you are wondering, why would a website owner not want the search engine crawlers and bots to get to certain web pages, we can tell you that there are reasons.

Why webmasters prevent the bots from accessing certain webpages:

The most common example is of the e-commerce websites. Suppose you have an e-commerce website and have your database stored on it, you would definitely want to keep it away from everyone. Of course the database that includes personal information of your clients must be kept confidential. If you aren’t taking any measure to prevent the bots from getting on it, these search engine crawlers are sure to crawl to those pages and index them as well. Now everyone can view the details of your clients and also of your business. Before long, opportunists will take advantage and you along with your client will in trouble deep. The use of robots.txt prevents the access to these pages which are likely to be kept private by the website owner. This is like a file and the ones stored in it will remain inaccessible from the search engine bots.

Is robots.txt safe for your pages?

However, the search engines are still able to see the pages that they are being prevented from. This is due to the artificial intelligence built in them and through this, they can very well sense the existence of the robots.txt file. However, they cannot practice this or else they are to answer for legal violation. Therefore even if they can, the bots aren’t going to violate the privacy enabled to you by robots.txt files.  Yet there is something for you to worry about. The bots may not do anything wrong to you, but the spammers definitely can. These spammers are intelligent enough to use the robots for crawling your private pages even and there is nothing much to be done about it. Therefore the use of others like password protecting software, firewall, encrypting software and other security system is highly essential besides the use of robots.txt for your website’s overall privacy.

Text the effectiveness of robots.txt file:

It is recommended to test your robots.txt file before uploading it on your site’s domain. Use Google Webmaster Tools for this and the result will tell how much it will be effective.