• Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yeah I always assumed robots.txt only told them to hide it from search results, but Google still scrapes everything they can from you. The illusion they skipped over you

    • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      No you’ve got it backwards.

      Robots.txt absolutely stops Google from scraping your site.

      But they can still learn enough by scraping other sites that link to yours to build a concrete picture of the contents of your website and they will use that info to populate search results that link to you.

      If you don’t want to appear in search results, then you need to tell Google which pages to hide, and to tell them that you have to allow them to scrape your site.