When search engines crawl the site (good) they pick up the text in the chatterbox (bad). if you do a google search like

http://www.google.com/search?q=hellohiothellobr

You get a few perlmonks hits (this was a nonsense test string for a perl discussion in the chatterbox)

If you search on a nickname that was active in the chatterbox when the bot came through, however ..

http://www.google.com/search?q=jackdied

You get a bunch (google thankfully removes the redundant ones). Try it with any nick and you'll get at least a few hits.

Other than a robots.txt file exists, I don't know how specific you can be when telling a bot how to behave. Is there an easy way to change the chatterbox behavior without reducing the functionality?

-jack

ps, and yes I was doing a vanity search on google when I discovered the behavior.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.