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A comment on How rel=nofollow Works. Parent comment

Re:How rel=nofollow Works by abalone on Thursday January 12, 2012 @03:53PM (#3457909)
That doesn't make sense. Twitter's robots.txt allows profile pages and tweets to be indexed, and Google does index them. Google is simply choosing to exclude them from their people & places feature so that they can favor their own Google+ profiles.

It's only the outbound links within tweets that Google is forbidden from indexing. That has nothing to do with why Google excludes content on twitter.com itself.

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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by nknight on Thursday January 12, 2012 @08:30PM (#3458756)
> That has nothing to do with why Google excludes content on twitter.com itself.

Um, they don't. That's not what this is about. You need to research the actual feature that's causing controversy, because it's not "Twitter doesn't show up in search", not even close.

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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by abalone on Thursday January 12, 2012 @08:43PM (#3458787)
The People & Pages feature. On Google search. Is excluding twitter.com content.

Example: http://parislemon.com/post/15682237911/twitter-keeps-right-o...

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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by nknight on Thursday January 12, 2012 @09:51PM (#3458954)
So what? That's not part of the standard search. Since when is Google not allowed to advertise its own services alongside standard search results? What's next, do you whine that Bing has links to MSN and Hotmail?

Twitter actually contaminates ordinary search results on its site with paid tweets, and you're mad Google puts some Google+ content off to one side? WTF?

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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by abalone on Friday January 13, 2012 @07:57PM (#3463120)
Oh, it's definitely part of standard search now. Schmidt said Twitter content wasn't included because they didn't have "permission" to index it. That's false. They are purposefully excluding it -- a point of fact which I'm glad to see you acknowledge now.
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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by nknight on Saturday January 14, 2012 @12:17AM (#3463538)
No, it's not part of standard search. And since you seem to know everything that goes on between Twitter and Google, perhaps you could share with us the documents showing Google has the permission it needs to include Twitter results in this very not-standard-search feature?

Edit: By the way, are you a lawyer? If not, even given your apparent insider knowledge of Google and Twitter goings-on, how do you know your legal understanding is correct?

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Re:How rel=nofollow Works by abalone on Monday January 16, 2012 @05:32PM (#3472902)
Sure, I'd be happy to. Here it is: http://twitter.com/robots.txt
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