Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why does Google use “Allow” in robots.txt, when the standard seems to be “Disallow?”

4th February 2012

My answer to Why does Google use “Allow” in robots.txt, when the standard seems to be “Disallow?” on Quora

The Disallow command prevents search engines from crawling your site.

The Allow command allows them to crawl your site.

If you’re using the Google Webmaster tools, you probably want Google to crawl your site.

Am I misunderstanding your question?