No, disallow means that you are not allowed to crawl the page. You have to crawl the page to no you cannot index it. But how do you index it if you do not crawl the page, well if another page that you can crawl and index points to the page you cannot index as authoritative on a keyword then it be in the index with that keyword, even if you do not have the actual crawled content of the page.

It really feels like they need to allow a list of `noindex` pages in the robots.txt then...

The whole point is they don’t want you to easily opt out of it.

Keep walking down that path to find v. heavy regulation.

Not if you buy the government first. I think they’re already a victim of their own greed though.

It’s bad enough I started using DDG for search because the results are now more relevant. Google’s advertising algorithms are designed to subtly nudge sites into paying for placement — which means there’s a “non-content” element to the search results that makes it into the user experience. I feel like there was a tipping point a year or two ago where the results just stopped being useful — The best analogy I can find is how search engines used to be in the days before AltaVista. Then AltaVista came out and the results were far more relevant (if not perfect). Google -> DDG feels like that in 2019.

That “non-content” element will only grow over time as Google seeks revenue growth — growth across all of Google’s non-advertising revenue streams combined are not enough to move the needle compared to the scale their ad business has — of which search ads are by far the most profitable. So they will further try to monetize search; it’s their cash cow but I think a small player like DDG could easily overtake them as the quality of Google’s search results (to the end user) continue to decline.

Agreed re: DDG search quality. It's my own default and preferred choice. Google remains useful for Scholar and Books, but relevance and deceptive ads on SERPS is rapidly declining.

Right, but how do you index a page you weren't supposed to crawl in the first place?

It's like recommending a book you haven't read, and newspapers do that every day.

Basically Google finds the link in other places -> oh that must be interesting, I'm indexing it, without even reading it. So they don't have the actual content, and just use the texts from the sites that link to it.

But they do have the actual content since they show the meta title an description on top of what I assume is heavy NLP to drive the search engine itself.

Robots stops a page from being crawled the noindex tag stops it getting into the index.

Google is also slow to honour 404 and drop pages which can hang around for ages, Bing is much faster to remove 404 pages.

Usually, creating "410 Gone"[0] response for the URL and running the URL through the URL Inspection Tool [1] can help make things a bit faster. But yeah, it does take a while to get these 404s removed.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410 [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

That distinction exists in many systems. E.g. for cloud events, 404 is considered with skepticism because it could be a race condition in provisioning or transient issue whereas 410 requires data streams to be cut off.

Then you should serve 503

5xx means that the server made a mistake. 4xx means that the caller made a mistake. Sending a request to a GONE url is canonically classified as a “user” or sender error.