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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.
Kinda, but also not really. Any major tech player that has billions to lose will make a show of respecting robots.txt when presenting that information to third parties, lest they be exposed by basic journalism.
However, they also have separate networks in R&D that sweep the net all the time and do not care about such restrictions. It’s theatre.
And they’re still happy to punish people that have the gall to publicly decline their crawlers. Basically they can eat their cake and have it too.