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Comment by rsbadger | Hacker News Reader

I found them in Bing results

Are the URLs being served with a “noindex” header? Blocking crawls with robots.txt cannot de-list items from Google or other search engines.

> Warning: Don't use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results. If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex.

From https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in...

They are now - I didn't think I had to as all the pages are naturally behind a login, it never crossed my mind that Bing would follow email links, let alone index them in search results.

> Warning: Don't use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results.

I realize that you are just the messenger and not the progenitor of that policy, so not addressing this to you, but: that is ridiculous. robots.txt is basically useless.

Robots.txt is a mechanism for providing instructions to automated crawlers but I don't think they've ever been promised to be used when a URL is manually or automatically submitted through other means (i.e. another site linking to yours). In those cases, a single page will probably be crawled, but the rest of the domain probably won't.

That should be clearer in the article. It's not evident from the SO question or from what you've actually written. A screenshot of those search results would go a long way towards making the article sound more credible.

Yeh I was a bit reluctant to post that as it doesn't look great for my app! But here's the results: https://www.bing.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fshoprocket.io%2F...

Could it be that they were taken from the MS Edge history? I mean still amazingly bad but just throwing it out there. Could explain the gmail ones as well

Quite possibly…

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