this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Yeah I always assumed robots.txt only told them to hide it from search results, but Google still scrapes everything they can from you. The illusion they skipped over you
If you look in the server logs, you can see what their spiders are grabbing.
No you've got it backwards.
Robots.txt absolutely stops Google from scraping your site.
But they can still learn enough by scraping other sites that link to yours to build a concrete picture of the contents of your website and they will use that info to populate search results that link to you.
If you don't want to appear in search results, then you need to tell Google which pages to hide, and to tell them that you have to allow them to scrape your site.