Technical Guide: Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309)
1. What is robots.txt & How RFC 9309 Works?
The robots.txt file guides search engine bots on which URLs they can crawl on your site to preserve crawl budget and protect server resources.
2. Disallow vs noindex Meta Tag: The Major Pitfall
Disallow prevents crawlers from fetching the page content, but Google may still index the URL if referenced externally. Use meta noindex to guarantee complete removal from SERPs.