/tech/ - Technical SEO

we need to stop treating robots. txt like a security firewall for sensitive directories. relying on it to hide private data is pure negligence and relies entirely on the goodwill of bots that are increasingly designed to ignore it. if you have sensitive files, you should be using proper authentication or at least an ip-based restriction via auth_basic user password. anyone still thinking a disallow directive protects their proprietary logic is hallucinating . the only real job for this file is managing crawl budget and preventing useless resource consumption on your server. stop treating it like a magic shield.