Yesterday we reported that Craigslist Blocks Most Spiders: Millions of Pages Delisted. Danny Sullivan did some deep research on this and came to the conclusion that Craigslist Not Blocking Major Crawlers. He said;
Avi Wilensky, who posted at the forums, assumed some new change must be in place when he couldn't find a real estate listing from Craigslist via a Google search that brought it up that listing only a few days before. Checking the Craigslist robots.txt file, he noticed that sections with listings about community, housing, for sale, services, gigs and jobs items seemed to be blocked.At a quick glance, I could see why someone might assume that entire swaths of listings were being blocked. However, the listings themselves are not contained within these sections.
Bottom-line is that I and everyone else, was looking at the .com version, when in fact we need to look at the .org version, which has almost 12 million results. Danny has more details and information at his blog entry and also at a large SEW members only article.
Forum discussion back at our forums.
