this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024

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Microsoft and Reddit Are Fighting About Why Bing’s Crawler Is Blocked on Reddit (www.404media.co)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

A search engine can't pay a website for having the honor of bringing them visits and ad views.

Fuck reddit, get delisted, no problem.

Weird that google is ignoring their robots.txt though.

Even if they pay them for being able to say that glue is perfect on pizza, having

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

should block googlebot too. That means google programmed an exception on googlebot to ignore robots.txt on that domain and that shouldn't be done. What's the purpose of that file then?

Because robots.txt is completely based on honor (there's no need to pretend being another bot, could just ignore it), should be

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Google is paying for the use of Reddit's API, not for scraping the site.

That's the new Reddit's business model: want "their" (users') content, then pay for API access.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I guessed in a previous comment that given their new partnership, Reddit is probably feeding their comment database to Google directly, which reduces load for both of them and permits Google to have real-time updates of the whole kit-and-kaboodle rather than polling individual pages. Both Google and Reddit are better-off doing that, and for Google it'd make sense for any site that's large-enough and valuable enough to warrant putting forth any effort special-case to that site.

I know that Reddit built functionality for that before, used it for pushshift.io and I believe bots.

I doubt that Google is actually using Googlebot on Reddit at all today.

I would bet against either Google violating robots.txt or Reddit serving different robots.txt files to different clients (why? It's just unnecessary complication).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think Reddit serves Googlebot a different robots.txt to prevent issues. For instance, check Google's cached version of robots.txt: it only blocks stuff that you'd expect to be blocked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

User-Agent: bender

Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass

Ha!

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I doubt Google respects any robots.txt

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

My robots.txt has been respected by every bot that visited it in the past three months. I know this because i wrote a page that IP bans anything that visits it, and l also put it as a not allowed spot in the robots.txt file.

I've only gotten like, 20 visits in the past three months though, so, very small sample size.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thank you for sharing

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know this because i wrote a page that IP bans anything that visits it, and l also put it as a not allowed spot in the robots.txt file.

This is fuckin GENIUS

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

only if you don't want any visits except from yourself, because this removes your site from any search engine

should write a "disallow: /juicy-content" and then block anything that tries to access that page (only bad bots would follow that path)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

You need to read again the thing that was described, more carefully. Imagine for example that by “a page,” the person means a page called /juicy-content or something.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's exactly what was described..?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oops. As a non-native English speaker I misunderstood what he meant. I understood wrongly that he set the server to ban everything that asked for robots.txt

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Just in case it makes you feel any better: I'm a native English speaker who always aced the reading comprehension tests back in school, and I read it the exact same way. Lol! I'm glad I wasn't the only one. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Interesting way of testing this. Another would be to search the search machines with adding site:your.domain (Edit: Typo corrected. Off course without - at -site:, otherwise you will exclude it, not limit to.) to show results from your site only. Not an exhaustive check, but another tool to test this behavior.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

for common people they respect and even warn a webmaster if they submit a sitemap that has paths included in robots.txt