John Mueller from Google did it again with his site and this time uploaded an audio file, in wav format, for his robots.txt file. You can go to it and listen to him read out his robots.txt rules in his own voice. It is a valid robots.txt file but I suspect zero search engines can understand it.
And they don’t understand it because of his German-Swiss accent, it is because search engines do not comprehend robots.txt files that are not in text format.
Here is the audio file located at johnmu.com/robots.txt:
Download audio
I spotted this from Michael Carrico on LinkedIn. Michael Carrico wrote, “Has anyone noticed John Mueller’s most recent Robots.txt file? It’s an audio file! Love that he tests these things on his own site. My assumption would be that he is testing whether Google can still digest the file properly. Very interesting!”
John replied, “It is a technically-valid robots.txt file too, it seems most crawlers accept it. I wrote up how it’s made but never got around to putting it up.” John told me, “It’s actually a valid text robots.txt file. Someone mentioned you can use view-source with it, and it’ll show it to you (or you can use ‘curl’ or some other command line tool, but who does that nowadays :-)). The robots.txt standard is flexible in that it skips over things it doesn’t understand, that’s also why Gary’s file works.”
Earlier this year, John had his site removed from Google Search.
Maybe he is having too much fun?
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
