diff --git a/docs/_config.yml b/docs/_config.yml
index 0b28991a6b..8cebbba0a3 100644
--- a/docs/_config.yml
+++ b/docs/_config.yml
@@ -32,6 +32,11 @@ defaults:
       path: ""
     values:
       layout: default
+  # exclude all the files from `/releases/` in the sitemap
+  - scope:
+      path:            releases/**
+    values:
+      sitemap:         false
 
 exclude:
   - 'ADDING_RELEASE_DOCS.md'
diff --git a/docs/robots.txt b/docs/robots.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..10ba859b73
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/robots.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+# This robots.txt file controls crawling of URLs under https://bnd.bndtools.org.
+# All crawlers are disallowed to crawl files in the "releases" directory, 
+# because they dilute search results, because they are outdated.
+User-agent: *
+Disallow: /releases/
+
+Sitemap: https://bnd.bndtools.org/sitemap.xml
\ No newline at end of file