The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced improvements they have made to the robots.txt analysis tool.
The tool now recognizes all sitemap declarations and relative URLs. So now the tool will report the validity of all sitemaps URLs plus show data for relative URLs. In addition, Google has expanded the reporting to include data for not just the first problem encountered, like they did in the past. Now they also show all problems encountered, on multiple lines and itemized by line number.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders
That’s good news, although unfortunately they have not done anything about the clear contrasting information they are spreading either through their webmaster help area or the robots.txt tool. I’ve documented this quite well over at the google groups but no feedback so far. Quite frankly I’m surprised no one has noticed this before considering you can seriously mess up a sites ranking based on the information google is giving out in these two places (one which directly contradicts the other).
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/181ea5d12a78b721/2f2fb41d38de199f