The preferred way of preventing parts of your site from being indexed
is to use the Control Center page exclusion mechanism. This is covered in
How to Exclude Pages from Search.
You should read that "how to" first.
The only reason you might need to use a robots.txt
file is if you want to prevent someone else from using this search engine
to index your site.
A "robots.txt" file
is a text file placed on your server which contains a list of robots
and "disallows" for those robots.
Each disallow will prevent any address that starts with the disallowed string
from being accessed.
This tutorial is not a web/html primer and assumes that you already know
how the process of "web surfing" is accomplished (i.e. a browser requests a page from a server which
then returns the page to be viewed), what an HTML "form" is and how it works,
and what a link "target" is.
If you are not familiar with these concepts please read a basic web/html primer.
Using a robots.txt file is easy,
but does require access to your server's root location.
For instance, if your site is located at: http://adomain.com/mysite/index.html
you will need to be able to create a file located here: http://adomain.com/robots.txt
If you cannot access your server's root location you will not be able to use a robots.txt
file to exclude pages from your index.
The robots.txt is a TEXT file (not HTML!)
which has a section for each robot to be controlled.
Each section has a user-agent line which names the robot to be controlled and has a list of "disallows" and "allows".
Each disallow will prevent any address that starts with the disallowed string
from being accessed.
Similarly, each allow will permit any address that starts with the allowed string
from being accessed.
The (dis)allows are scanned in order, with the last match encountered determining
whether an address is allowed to be used or not.
If there are no matches at all then the address will be used.
In this example all robots except the FreeFind spider will be prevented from
accessing files in the cgi-bin directory.
FreeFind will be able to access all files (a disallow with nothing after it
means "allow everything").
