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Couldn't they just use robot.txt to prevent Google from listing them? Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
by contravariant 6y ago
Couldn't they just use robot.txt to prevent Google from listing them?
Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
- jowsie 6y agoThey do want to show up on google, they just don't want the small page summary, as in a lot of cases, most people are happy with the title and a 2 line summary, never actually visiting the article.
- stephen_g 6y agoThat’s possible for a site to do, as far as I’m aware (in webmaster tools?) - I’ve seen results with a title and link and “this website doesn’t allow us to show a preview before). This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
- Symbiote 6y agoIt's done with meta tags in the HTML: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stephen_g 6y agoThat’s a point I’ve been making in Australia too. And now the media orgs are freaking out about losing the referrals from Facebook, but still trying to go on the false narrative that Google and Facebook make huge amounts of money “stealing news content”. Just before, I saw one reporter try to claim that social media sites allow users to bypass paywalls, but they never have! Facebook never showed actual article content here, just link, title and maybe a thumbnail...