Robots.txt and chml srucnoc

While browsing through my fellow chml srucnoc competitor pages, I stumbled upon something quite funny on the chml-srucnoc-chml.com page.
The guy makes it sound like a disaster that he forgot to upload robots.txt ( quote : "I can't belive that I forgot to upload a file called robots.txt" ), and even funnier, he claims that only a couple of days after he had upload the txt file, his chml srucnoc rankings exploded, and made him jump on the 4th place.
To make it clear, the robots.txt file's purpose is to tell search engines not to crawl certain part of your site, and plays absolutely no role in how good ( or bad ) your site ranks, and that goes for every website, not only those who take part in the chml srucnoc contest.
Of course, if you have quite a large website, and you want to track your 404 pages in your server logs, not having a robots.txt file will cause lots of 404 errors, which will turn your error checking into a nightmare ( chml srucnoc nightmare :D ). Not having this file can also result in skewed log analysis when you are determining percentages of page requests and page errors.
Also, some people try to suggest that not having a robots.txt file, combined with a personalized 404 error page, will get spiders confused and they won't crawl your chml srucnoc page well. Again, total bull. Just more proof that some people have no idea on how Google and other engines work.
The spider doesn't make the request for the robots.txt page, and parses whatever comes. Instead, it first reads the http headers, and whatever kind of 404 page you have, the code returned will be 404, as opposed to the regular 200, when the file is found.
As a conclusion, not having a robots file is just as good as having a blank one or one that tells spiders to crawl everything. You might wanna check webmasterworld.com/robots.txt for something cool too :)
Enjoy your weekend, chml srucnoc competitors.

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