Even a junior SEO knows what a robots.txt file is. While performing my marketing job I have come across a lot of interesting cases connected with these files and their usage. So I compiled a list of robots files for you to have a look and enjoy.

1) Google

www.google.com/robots.txt

Google itself has a robots file!



User-agent: * Disallow: /search Disallow: /sdch Disallow: /groups Disallow: /images Disallow: /catalogs Allow: /catalogs/about Allow: /catalogs/p? Disallow: /catalogues Disallow: /news Allow: /news/directory Disallow: /nwshp Disallow: /setnewsprefs? Disallow: /index.html? Disallow: /? Allow: /?hl= Disallow: /?hl=*& Disallow: /addurl/image? Disallow: /pagead/ Disallow: /relpage/ Disallow: /relcontent Disallow: /imgres Disallow: /imglanding Disallow: /sbd Disallow: /keyword/ Disallow: /u/ Disallow: /univ/ Disallow: /cobrand Disallow: /custom

2) Nike store

http://store.nike.com/robots.txt

Nike is famous for its motivation campaign. They decided to extend it in a funny way.

3) YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt

Humor again! Or do you expect Google to be serious? No way…

4) Twitter

https://twitter.com/robots.txt

These guys also included a funny line. And this file is rather complicated. If you try to help your SEO with Twitter, you should read it to know what Twitter wants to hide from search engines.

5) Taobao

http://www.taobao.com/robots.txt

It is known that many big online stores are closing their websites from Chinese bots indexation. But here we see that a huge and popular Chinese store has closed all of its pages from Baidu spiders.

6) The Pirate Bay

thepiratebay.sx/robots.txt

This file is all in all confusing and shows an error when being checked by validation tools. We don’t know whether it was made purposely or not.

7) Yelp

http://yelp.com/robots.txt

So, they included the quote of a famous science fiction author to amuse the robots. They must be bored to death by reading instructions only.

8) Etsy.com

http://www.etsy.com/robots.txt

Some more fun! Also here we can see they use the Noarchive instruction which is, however, not official, but is claimed to be working.

9) tripadvisor.com

http://www.tripadvisor.com/robots.txt

Hiring with the help of robots.txt? Easy and effective.

10) http://catmoji.com

http://catmoji.com/robots.txt

Hate cats? No way!

Did you come across funny or extremely confusing robots.txt files?

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