Re: in-document directive to discourage indexing ?

Benjamin Franz (snowhare@netimages.com)
Mon, 24 Jun 1996 12:36:49 -0700 (PDT)


On Mon, 24 Jun 1996, Kevin Hoogheem wrote:

> I was wondering if anyone has thought that a mandatory
> section of a New Robot Standard or even if anyone has talked
> to anyone about making a Admin-Email entry a standard
> in webservers.
> Why should a Admin-Email entry be mandatory, well I can think of
> one reason and that is Since most people that
> have written robots have the ablity to tell if a link is bad or doesnt
> work anymore with there robot they could easily send a message to the
> administrator of that website with the url and description of the problem
> they have on that page, It would be a way that some Big search engines
> can also give back to the community and also would open up a new
> door for other robots that could better perform checking of websites.
>

It is a bad idea because many ISPs provide web service for all their
customers but have almost no control over things like bad links on
customer's pages. If a web robot started mailing me about every customer's
bad link either all its mail would soon be auto-filtered to /dev/null or
I would exclude the robot from the server.

-- 
Benjamin Franz