Craigslist Blocks Most Spiders: Millions of Pages Delisted

A thread started at our forums named Craigslist Delists Millions of Pages from Search Engine Indexes uncovers the new robots.txt file in place over at Craigslist. It basically reads;

############################## # Exclude robots from these

User-agent: YahooFeedSeeker Disallow: /forums Disallow: /res/ Disallow: /post Disallow: /email.friend Disallow: /?flagCode Disallow: /ccc Disallow: /hhh Disallow: /sss Disallow: /bbb Disallow: /ggg Disallow: /jjj

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /cgi-secure Disallow: /forums Disallow: /search Disallow: /res/ Disallow: /post Disallow: /email.friend Disallow: /?flagCode Disallow: /ccc Disallow: /hhh Disallow: /sss Disallow: /bbb Disallow: /ggg Disallow: /jjj

#####################################

They supposedly had millions, 3.6 Million to be exact, of pages indexed at Google and millions at the other search engines. Now? 211,000 at Google, 280,000 at Yahoo and 4,695 atMSN.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.