MSN Not Listening To Robots.txt Files? Or?

Jul 11, 2006 - 7:19 am 0 by
Filed Under Bing Search

A Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread shows how MSN may not be properly listening to a robots.txt rule that Google set up for api.google.com. If you review Google's robots.txt file at http://api.google.com/robots.txt you will see the standard, do not index command. But if you go to MSN Search and conduct a site command search for site:api.google.com you will notice MSN has 14 results.

You will also notice those results are not full, they only contain the URL data. This is common, where the search engines will crawl just the URLs and not the content. I believe that may be the interpretation of the disallow. Take a look at Google, they are indexing site:api.google.com URLs, and so is Yahoo! Search, and they are all doing it the same way.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility This Weekend - Around June 6th

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:55 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Document On Third-Party SEO Tools, Services & Advice

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Updates Its Hiring An SEO Doc Warning On SEO Tools & AI Optimization

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Search Profiles Insights & Analytics

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:21 am
Google

Google: Google Chrome Won't Set AI Mode The Default Search Experience

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: Google AdWords's Hidden Inactive Keywords