Support for the x-robots-tag HTTP Header
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Key: NUTCH-1257
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-1257
Project: Nutch
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: fetcher
Reporter: Mike
Google and Bing both currently support the x-robots-tag HTTP header. This is
important, because they have a policy of not *crawling* links that are in a
robots.txt file, and not *indexing* links that are set to noindex. In the case
that a page is indexed but not crawled, Google and Bing will show the page in
their results, but it will lack a snippet (since they didn't crawl it, they
can't generate one).
As a result, the only way to block Google and Bing from having a page in their
index is to use the robots meta tag in HTML pages and the x-robots-tag in other
mimetypes.
As a site owner that needs to keep specific pages private, I *cannot* trust
robots.txt to keep my pages out of Google and Bing, and I have to use the two
robots standards. Since Nutch doesn't support the HTTP header, I have to block
it from crawling ALL non-HTML pages on my site.
This is not an ideal state of affairs, and it would be great if Nutch supported
the x-robots-tag HTTP header.
I've done more research on this topic on my blog:
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http://michaeljaylissner.com/blog/support-for-x-robots-tag-http-header-and-robots-HTML-meta-tag
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http://michaeljaylissner.com/blog/respecting-privacy-while-providing-hundreds-of-thousands-of-public-documents
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