Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for.
My LinkedIn posts became broken Ever since I changed my robots.txt file, I started seeing that my LinkedIn posts no longer had the preview of the article available. I was not sure what the issue was initially, since before then it used to work just fine. In addition to that, I have noticed that LinkedIn’s algorithm has started serving my posts to fewer and fewer connections. I was a bit confused by the issue, thinking that it might have been a temporary problem. But over the next two weeks the missing post previews did not appear.
The CEO of Cloudflare did not assert that. I was surprised that he would claim such a thing, and that should have made me read more carefully. Elon Musk notwithstanding, neither incompetence nor conspiracy theorizing are common at that level, publicly anyway.
You can believe whatever you like, of course. Freedom of opinion is nothing if not the right to be wrong.
Right, but the article does. Anyway, I’m moving on. Thanks for the discussion.