

Google Acknowledges What A Mess This Is - huskyseo
http://www.huskyseo.co.uk/blog/google-acknowledges-mess/

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weddpros
robots.txt would have been the only reasonable option: force publishers to
dereference content by putting censored content in their robots.txt file...

It's a scalable solution, already implemented by Google for this exact
purpose: publishers can choose what they want indexed.

Don't you share my pov?

~~~
ttctciyf
If you mean: when Some Guy complains that publisher.com/somePage turns up in
search results for _Some Guy_ , publisher.com should put _Disallow: /somePage_
in their robots.txt, then I don't share your POV, because google can still
index publisher.com/somePage under the stupid EU law. They are just not
allowed to show it in results for the specific search: _Some Guy_

Suppose publisher.com/somePage has the following content:

    
    
       So, Some Guy did this really bad thing in November 1963.
    

and Some Guy successfully complains to have this page removed from search
results on his name.

Then searches for _really bad thing November 1963_ would, and should, under
the current implementation of the stupid EU law, turn up
publisher.com/somePage in the results. Just not searches for _Some Guy_.

Robots.txt isn't flexible enough to allow this, I think.

~~~
weddpros
Then it's not as broad (and clever) as I thought. Some Guy will not be
forgotten at all, ie. the law will be useless.

This law doesn't scale at all.

A search for "Some Guy" on the publisher's website or another search engine
will return "somePage".

IMHO, Stupid law, custom made to piss Google.

~~~
ttctciyf
Yeah, it's just dumb. Indeed, a search for "Some Guy" on the US version of
google will also return somePage. To circumvent this legal provision, as a UK
net user, you only have to go to
[http://google.com/ncr](http://google.com/ncr) so that you use google.com
instead of google.co.uk. Once done, your search results are no longer
restricted.

So yes, unbelievably dumb and useless. Rivaled in dumbness only by the EU
Privacy Directive, AKA the "stupid EU cookie law".

