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.

 

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