Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for. My LinkedIn posts became broken Ever since I changed my robots.txt file, I started seeing that my LinkedIn posts no longer had the preview of the article available. I was not sure what the issue was initially, since before then it used to work just fine. In addition to that, I have noticed that LinkedIn’s algorithm has started serving my posts to fewer and fewer connections. I was a bit confused by the issue, thinking that it might have been a temporary problem. But over the next two weeks the missing post previews did not appear.
  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    602·
    5 months ago

    What did he think a crawler is? Why was he surprised that not allowing companies to use his data lead to them not using his data? Looks like he has another surprise coming when he notices that search engines no longer index his blog.

    • Archr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      5 months ago

      I feel like most casual users would not make the connection of “crawlers” to link previews that they talk about it the article.

      Sure, if you understand that robots.txt includes all robots then sure. But that is not how general news media has been talking about robots.txt.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        that is not how general news media has been talking about robots.txt.

        Ahh, yes. I think there is a lesson there.

  • thedruid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    5 months ago

    So. If I can add something here for everyone’s benefit

    No search engine really obeys robots.txt

    Their publicly acknowledged crawlers do, but they have other crawlers that aren’t know that ignore the file.

    Google knows every inch of your site, allowed or not.

    See, just because a search engine says it doesn’t know, doesn’t mean it hasn’t crawled. Just doesn’t display the results based on your settings.