robots.txt

from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)

standard for robot exclusion
robot exclusion standard
robots.txt

   <World-Wide Web> A proposal to try to prevent the havoc
   wreaked by many of the early {World-Wide Web} {robots} when
   they retrieved documents too rapidly or retrieved documents
   that had side effects (such as voting).  The proposed standard
   for robot exclusion offers a solution to these problems in the
   form of a file called "robots.txt" placed in the {document
   root} of the {web site}.

   W3C standard
   (http://w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1).

   (2006-10-17)