Robots.txt for the "Customer Support" section.

[DmC]

Hey there

 

How about modifying your robots.txt to exclude from search engines the Support section and all it's sub forums?

 

Users are publishing emails and personal data very often and that move will help their privacy.

 

It's a simple line with a major result

Edited May 9, 2018 by DmC

[wolstech]

Google depends on being allowed to scan the pages not only to index for search, but to target the ads. The forum ads and (when he works) Johnny cPanel ads are some of our leading sources of revenue, so reducing their appeal by blocking the content inspection would be counterproductive.

 

Then there's the relevant content that outsiders might see on Google (e.g. discussions of htaccess files, PHP code troubleshooting, etc.) that brings them here for non-hosting reasons. We need all the traffic and money we can get considering we operate at a loss most months.

 

Users who don't want their information posted publicly can always ask for their topic to be removed after being helped. Google will remove it in due time or not index it at all if we hide/delete it. I received a content-removal request for a user from 2011 last week...I spent the 20 minutes to nuke his posts and forum account for him.

 

We don't offer private support by design though, because we want others to be able to learn from the past. While some of us do answer PMs (such as myself), they often take longer to get a response to, and in many cases we end up asking you to post on the forum anyway so multiple admins can assist.