errors found in my stats

[emmanuelle]

I seem to be finding a lot of 404 errors in my stats, for /robots.txt and for /favicon.ico

Can somebody please explain to me what these do and why I should have them?
{need coffee}

thanks!

[amph]

robots.txt is a file that tells SE spiders wether or not should they index/crawl your site and what parts of it they should/shouldnt crawl

favicon.ico is an icon that IE displays next to the entries in the bookmarks (favourites) menu

You dont really need any of those

[emmanuelle]

thank you

Now why are they coming up as 404? Who is looking for them? Are they standard browser requests?

[amph]

Read my post above, think about it for a second and you should figure out the answer

[Dildozer]

Spiders ask for the robots.txt
Bookmarkers ask for the favicon.ico (like when you bookmark GFY, you have the hand giving the finger in your bookmarks, that's the favicon)