• mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    4 months ago

    Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

    Problem is that you’re also blocking search engines to index your site, no?

    No. That’s why they wrote “this particular area”.

    The point is to have an area of the site that serves no purpose other than to catch bots that ignore the rules in robots.txt. Legit search engine indexers will respect directives in robots.txt to avoid that area; they will still index everything else. Bad bots will ignore the directives, index the forbidden area anyway, and by doing so, reveal themselves in the server logs.

    That’s the trap, aka honeypot.