Google's Video Crawler Not Respecting Robots.txt Directives?

Dec 1, 2008 - 8:14 am 1 by
Filed Under Google

It seems like we have confirmed reports from a Googler in Google Groups that Google's video crawler, part of the GoogleBot family, is not playing nice. In short, even though you may be telling Google not to crawl your videos, they will anyway.

One person said it has been going on for 1.5 months already and he has no idea what else to do.

JohnMu from Google apologized saying:

I've passed this on to the video search team to look at (and fix :-)). I don't know how soon you will see changes, but now that they're informed things should generally change soon. If you don't see a change in a few weeks, please post back here again.

Hopefully this will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Update: John commented with a clarification and I wanted to make sure you all saw it:

Hi Barry, I just wanted to clarify something quickly on this - it's not that we're not following the directives (to disallow crawling). Instead, we've already crawled these URLs earlier and even with a disallow statement they'll generally remain in the index for a while (which is how it generally works with robots.txt files). I was hoping that they would drop out quicker, which seems to be what the webmaster would prefer.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility Heats Up - Movember Update

Nov 8, 2025 - 8:05 pm
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 7, 2025

Nov 7, 2025 - 10:01 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Drops Search Features, Tests AI Mode Responses, Ad Click Trickery & More

Nov 7, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Ads

New Google Merchant Center Preferred Audience Targeting For Promotions

Nov 7, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Performance Max Gains Waze Ads & Channel Performance Reporting

Nov 7, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Finance Gets Live Audio, Instant Transcripts & AI Insights

Nov 7, 2025 - 7:31 am
 
Previous Story: How Does Changing Your Navigational Links To Rich Keywords Impact Rankings?