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How to hide Ryanair
- SeanDav 16y agoA part of me would love to do this - just to teach them a lesson....Maybe I will save it for Dr Evil day!
- MichaelApproved 16y agoWhat lesson are you trying to teach them?
- jsmcgd 16y agoThat they should think through the consequences of their terms and conditions.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y agoThey do. Its just like signing a lease which indicates "no pets allowed" when everyone and their mother in the building has one, and the landlord knows. Its because if the clause is not in there and your dog is howling all night long they can do nothing. They may want content farms not linking, or perhaps other unknown super secret spy stuff?
- shpxnvz 16y agoIt's more like walking into a store that has a tiny book on the floor inside the door that, if you open and read it, tells you that by having already entered the store you've agreed to be prohibited from telling anybody about anything you've seen inside without written consent.
- furyg3 16y agoGoogle should, for giggles, just drop a good number of sites with these terms one day.
- Tichy 16y agoGoogle probably would get the permission to link to Ryanair, though. And Google has to look good in the eye of searchers. They want to find what they are looking for and don't really care about the reasons for some results to be not available.
- ZitchDog 16y agoGoogle probably assumes that if you are not disallowing their spider via robots.txt you are consenting to allow Google to index your content.
- snorkel 16y agoBut Google is in a unique position to quickly correct a lot of bad T&C behaviors simply by implying that having those terms may hurt the SEO of offending sites. If SEOs suspected that was part of Google's ranking process then we'd see a lot of bad T&C clauses suddenly dropped.
- alex_c 16y agoThe phrase "Google is in a unique position to quickly correct a lot of bad [...] behaviors" sends chills down my spine.
- snorkel 16y agoNot a bad idea actually, and it'd be even more effective if Google also penalized sites that link to other sites with unreasonable T&C.
- Chrono 16y agoSince this is Ryanair we are talking about... I hope someone actually does this.
- jvdongen 16y agoFunny how the page containing the terms of service for ryanair is titled 'copywrite' :)
- ivank 16y agoHow exactly would deoptimizing Ryanair hurt them financially? Do Ryanair customers search Google for anything but "Ryanair" when they want to get to ryanair.com?
- cavedave 16y agowell a google of "cheap flight dublin london" Ryanair comes up third. Which implies they must get a fair amount of traffic from search engines
- rmc 16y ago3rd place gets you, what 10% of the people who search for it?
- cavedave 16y agoThat is a fair point. I would guess it it 10% more of the clicks than 11th place though
- heyitsnick 16y agoDepends what the first 2 results are. fwiw they are 2nd on duckduckgo for grandparents search, and the first airline.
- perlgeek 16y agoThat can be quite a number, depending on how many actually search for it.
- eam 16y agoDear cavedave, this is an official notice to remind you that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" as per the Terms & Conditions. In your blog post, you have linked ryanair.com in the sentence containing: 3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website Please kindly unlink or be prepared for further legal action. I will be sending you an email as well. Thank you, EAM Associates
- bromley 16y ago"You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Ryanair’s own discretion." I wonder if Google have got written consent to link to Ryanair from their search results...
- MichaelApproved 16y agoWhy do companies even have this clause in their T&C? What's the benefit?
- barredo 16y agoI would guess they would use this clause in a trial if someone links to their site with something the dont like, ie: "ryanair kill my dog"
- praptak 16y agoToo many lawyers who want to look useful. I actually remember my boss telling me to put bullshit clauses in contract drafts so that those people have something to chew at and refrain from messing with the actual matter of the contract.
- patrickk 16y agoReminds me of this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-jargon-you-coined/2444361#2444361 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-j... It was on HN a while back.
- bambax 16y agoThis is a well known tactic, and it works. When discussing a list of points in a meeting, the secret is to have a big controversial question come up first (that you don't actually care about): dealing with this first question eats up time, but what's better, it exhausts everyone. Then all the following points are much easier to sell.
- eli 16y agoRyanair probably hates airline deal sites.
- rmc 16y agoProbably to stop online 'price compare' or 'find a bargain' website. Ryanair want people to buy via their site so they can upsell.
- 16y ago
- matid 16y agoI assume that provided I never visit their website I'm not bound by their T&Cs and can therefore link to ryanair.com to my heart's content, right? :)
- chris_j 16y agoThe perverse thing about terms forbidding deep linking into a website is that it is so easy to prevent deep linking by technical means. (In fact, it's so easy that even mentioning it seems like a cliche.) On each HTTP request, examine the Referer: header and, if you don't like it, redirect to your homepage. Is there any reason why companies like Ryanair don't just do this?
- joelhaasnoot 16y agoIt's a blacklist, which inherently have their issues. Remember, this is Ryanair, that would mean their steward(esse)s have yet another task to do on their cell phones while supervising the boarding of 3 simultaneous flights.
- mckoss 16y agoActually, it's more like a whitelist - much easier to maintain if they really want to explicitly approve inbound link sites.
- btn 16y agoBecause these companies don't really want to forbid deep-linking, but establish some kind of recourse (regardless of whether it is legally enforceable, or just scary and threatening) against anyone who might offend them in some way.
- qntm 16y agoBecause circumventing that filter is even easier than installing the filter in the first place?
- waqf 16y agoCircumventing that filter is easy for the user, but I don't see how it's easy for the referring website.
- TimMontague 16y ago
- eam 16y agoWhile we're at it, Dustin Curtis should suggest a site re-design for Ryanair and blog about it to feel the full effect. ;) A bit off-topic, but I just visited American Airlines site and realized that they have updated it. In reference to http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html.
- dfhjkyuk 16y agoONLINE STORE: ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== Air jordan(1-24)shoes $30 Handbags(Coach l v f e n d i d&g) $35 Tshirts (Polo ,ed hardy,lacoste) $15 Jean(True Religion,ed hardy,coogi) $30 Sunglasses(Oakey,coach,gucci,A r m a i n i) $15 New era cap $12 Bikini (Ed hardy,polo) $20 accept paypal and free shipping ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )==== ====== ( http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com )====
- hammock 16y agoSuppose someone is found liable in civil court for deep linking to a website that prohibits it. What kind of damages could the website possibly be entitled to collect? I'm at a loss.
- joshkdavies 16y agoPlease excuse my ignorance if these guys are now owned by Ryanair, a quick Google suggests they are not, but it looks like Jetbird (an executive jet company) did a straight copy and paste of this for term 2.v. "(v) You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at JetBird own discretion." http://www.flyjetbird.com/en/fns/Terms-of-Use.aspx http://www.flyjetbird.com/en/fns/Terms-of-Use.aspx I wonder if Ryanair knows one of their competitors are using their T&C's. On the other hand, I wonder if Jetbird know they are listing one of their competitors on their website. Very amusing to see this! Makes you wonder how many companies Ctrl+C Ctrl+V their T&C's and Privacy Policies from other websites.
- lanstein 16y agoYou haven't met many lawyers, have you? ;)
- joshkdavies 16y agoNot many no, but the company name of who I'm stealing from would be the first thing I Ctrl+F!
- wtallis 16y agoWhen I hear lawyers and computers being talked about together, the first thing that comes to mind is that they tend to use WordPerfect. So, not only is it not safe to assume any level of computer savvyness, I'm not even sure that ctrl-f would be the right shortcut.
- mkramlich 16y agowebsites that forbid linking to them didn't get the memo on how the web works