Settings in Webmaster Tools like Geographic target and Query-parameters to ignore are great, but it means other Search Engines won’t have access to this data. Why not propose a new robots.txt directive for these settings? Andy, NY
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Google also "monkeyed" with the robots.txt file by adding the sitemap hint declaration. Google "whats new with sitemapsorg".
"Typically it's better to rely on not necessarily going in and monkeying with something that is really well understood and is relatively simple"
Google's already messed with the robots.txt standard, isn't its handling of the * wildcard different?