matthew@elvey.com (Matthew Elvey) [Wed 16 Nov 2005, 01:56 CET]:
Still no word from google, or indication that there's anything wrong with the robots.txt. Google's estimated hit count is going slightly up, instead of way down.
Way back in the early '90's someone came up with an elegant solution to this problem. When building a site in a folder named /httproot, all dynamic pages, i.e. scripts, were placed in a folder named /httproot/cgi-bin Then somebody invented robots.txt to allow people to tell spiders to leave the cgi-bin folder alone. Sites which follow the ancient paradigm do not run into these kinds of problems. Some people would say that asking the world to re-engineer the robots.txt protocol instead of building sites compliant with the protocol, is in violation of the robustness principle as expressed by Jon Postel in RFC 793 section 2.10 and reiterated in section 4.5 of RFC 3117. When something doesn't work, the correct operational response is to fix it. --Michael Dillon