SSL and robots.txt question - confused by Google guidelines

[McTaggart]

I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?

[Marten_Rapp]

No that's not what they mean - it means Google recommends you allow the secure version of your site(where applicable) to be crawled. You can still block certain pages/sections should you choose to do so.

With regards to noindexing  you could also place this on the actual page as an alternative.

[Daniel_Morgan]

Hi Luke,

Just make sure that your robots.txt file located at https://www.example.com/robots.txt doesn't block search engine spiders. Of course there may be some folders or filetypes you want to block but it certainly shouldn't look like below which would block everything:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Hope that helps