If you're reading this, chances are you've seen our robot visiting your site while looking through your server logs. When we crawl to populate our index, we advertise the "User-agent" string "Sproose".

Our bot does retrieve and parse robots.txt files, and it looks for robots META tags in HTML. These are the standard mechanisms for webmasters to tell web robots which portions of a site a robot is welcome to access.

robots.txt

Our bot follows the robots.txt exclusion standard, which is described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt. Depending on the configuration, our robot may obey different rules. To make it simple to send our bot away, we'll always obey rules for "Sproose".

To ban all bots from your site, place the following in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /


To ban the Sproose bot from your site, place the following in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Sproose
Disallow: /

Webmasters/Robots META

If you do not have permission to edit the /robots.txt file on your server, you can still tell robots not to index your pages or follow your links. The standard mechanism for this is the robots META tag, as described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html.

To tell the Sproose bot, and other robots, not to index your page or follow your links, insert this META tag into the HEAD section of your HTML document:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Of course, you can control the "index" and "follow" directives independantly. The keywords "all" or "none" are also allowed, meaning "index,follow" or "noindex,nofollow", respectively. Some examples are:

<meta name="robots" content="all">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="none">

If there are no robots META tags, or if an action is not specifically prohibited ie. neither "nofollow" or "none" appears), Sproose will assume it is allowed to index or follow links.