I have never heard of this, but will post a question about it on a Search
Engine Optimization list I'm on. I'll let you know.

Chuck Evans
Captura, Inc. 
(425) 803-6455 
http://www.captura.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Elizabeth H. [mailto:EHDavies(at)West.com]

Has anyone ever seen or used the ROBOTS.TXT file as a place to put keywords
or other META tags?

Reason: my company is having a ecommerce site builder being built for them
by another company. The current product did not provide any area for META
tags for search engines (this was a requirement). I pointed this out to my
boss and they replied to him that they would have a robots.txt file where
all keywords entered will be placed. I don't think that this will replace
having regular META description and keyword tags.

I've only seen robots.txt used for exclusion. I have NEVER seen them replace
the META tags. Also, non-robot search engines don't even touch that file. I
know that the ability to be listed by Yahoo is pretty darned important to
our clients. 

I've only been with this company for 3 months and previous to this was
designing brochure-ware sites for non-profits and personal pages for 4
years. I consider myself an intermediate web designer, not an expert by any
stretch of the imagination. Even though I haven't found ANYWHERE on the web
that puts this as a use for robots.txt.... maybe one of you has.

Is this a viable method? or are they simply blowing smoke.

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