An interesting discussion is taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of the robots.txt file. One webmaster did not want his robots.txt file to be indexed by Google, but has no way of delisting in in Google.

The only ways of removing content is Google includes:

Via meta tagsVia robots.txt commandReturn a 404 server statusUse the Remove URLs feature in Webmaster ToolsPassword protect the pageSome more ideas on how to remove content in Google can be found there.

But if you implement any of those, Google will likely remove your robots.txt, and it won’t follow the rules you have implemented in that file. Which can be very upsetting for webmasters. So if you block you block your robots.txt file in your robots.txt file, does Google really see the robots.txt file to block it? (Okay, that was a bit of a joke, but it makes the point).

That brings up the question, should Google list robots.txt files in the search results? In most cases, they do not contain any useful content for searchers. Well, with the exception of Brett Tabke’s robots.txt blog, which is a hilarious idea. But outside of that, how is it useful?

As Tedster notes, Google has indexed plenty robots.txt files, should they?

Let me ask you, here is a poll. Should Google display robots.txt files in the search results (even for searches like [inurl:robots.txt filetype.txt])?

There is an “other” option, but try not to use it. 🙂

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google’s JohnMu commented below explaining how to block your robots.txt file from showing up. News to me, this is excellent news: