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GPEN · Question #238

You want that some of your Web pages should not be crawled. Which one of the following options will you use to accomplish the task?

The correct answer is C. Place the name of restricted Web pages in the robotes.txt file. The robots.txt file is the standard mechanism used to instruct compliant web crawlers which pages or directories on a site should not be crawled.

Penetration Testing Foundations & Reconnaissance

Question

You want that some of your Web pages should not be crawled. Which one of the following options will you use to accomplish the task?

Options

  • AUse HTML NO Crawl tag in the Web page not to be crawled
  • BPlace the name of restricted Web pages in the private.txt file
  • CPlace the name of restricted Web pages in the robotes.txt file
  • DEnable the SSL

How the community answered

(24 responses)
  • A
    4% (1)
  • B
    4% (1)
  • C
    79% (19)
  • D
    13% (3)

Why each option

The robots.txt file is the standard mechanism used to instruct compliant web crawlers which pages or directories on a site should not be crawled.

AUse HTML NO Crawl tag in the Web page not to be crawled

There is no standard HTML tag called 'NO Crawl' - while a meta robots tag with content='noindex' exists, it only signals the crawler not to index the page after it has already been fetched, and does not prevent crawling.

BPlace the name of restricted Web pages in the private.txt file

There is no standard file named 'private.txt' recognized by web crawlers - only robots.txt is specified in the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

CPlace the name of restricted Web pages in the robotes.txt fileCorrect

The robots.txt file, placed in the root directory of a web server, uses the Robots Exclusion Protocol to communicate crawling restrictions to compliant web crawlers via Disallow directives for specific paths. This prevents those pages from being crawled or indexed and is the universally accepted standard supported by all major search engine crawlers. Any web page listed under a Disallow directive will be skipped by robots that honor the protocol.

DEnable the SSL

Enabling SSL/TLS secures data in transit between the browser and server but does not instruct or restrict crawlers from accessing web pages.

Concept tested: Robots Exclusion Protocol and robots.txt usage

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro

Topics

#robots.txt#web crawling#web reconnaissance#search engine directives

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