What a yoga studio needs to know about robots.txt

HTTPS is table stakes, but robots.txt is where trust actually lives for a yoga studio. A padlock with a misconfigured record behind it is decoration, not security.

Maintenance is not glamorous, but it is the reason a yoga studio has not had downtime since we took over robots.txt. The invoice is small and the peace of mind is large.

Every technical decision for a yoga studio comes back to one question: does this help the person looking at the site right now? If robots.txt is invisible to that person, it is working.

After the move, a plugin login nobody has used since March broke search indexing for a yoga studio. Google kept serving the old pages for another nineteen days.

We found a plugin login nobody has used since March during a routine check of robots.txt. The site had been leaking referrer data for six weeks before anyone noticed.

Related work on this site follows the same principle: one job, a real inbox, no theatre. a yoga studio did not need four analytics dashboards to know that Tuesdays are slow.

Most of the damage we see in robots.txt comes from doing too much. A single correct record beats three that were supposed to be clever.

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