[LINK] A legal request to add a disclaimer to an old linkposting

[Ash Nallawalla]

> From: Robin Whittle

> If they want to comment on a previous message, such as it being no
> longer true, then they can write to the list.   Since the 
> list archives are no longer visible to search engines 

Are you sure?  Google can see archives as recently as March but not
April, but I'd attribute it to Google's crawl cycle.  The deep crawl is
trawling my sites today.

Try a Google search for  "jeff.evans at iird.vic.gov.au" to see a recent
post.

The headers in the monthly index now say <META NAME="robots"
CONTENT="noindex,follow"> which used to say "index,nofollow". 

But the header for a given article says "index,nofollow"

The monthly index instruction is for a well-behaved crawler to not index
that page but to follow every discussion article in it.  (The index
isn't in Google but the intro to the Link list is - and it has no robot
instructions, so its link to the monthly archive can be followed).

Individual articles tell robots to index the text but not to follow any
links we may make in our articles.  To be invisible to decent crawlers
the header should read "noindex,nofollow" both at the article and index
level.  That would stop someone from placing their own link directly to
an archived article.

Therefore, I suspect that this article will soon be in Google.