Originally Posted by
itsaboutthejourney
Apparently Mr. Alexei Khokhlov's specialty is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Expect more of this with your recently loosened requirements to be logged in, let alone a FT member to view posts by allowing "bots" to crawl your site.
Except for a couple forums, FT has always been accessible without logging in.
Bots have been crawling FT for years. I found FT in 2004 when I was Googling for info on NW "W" fare bump vouchers; Google's entire database is based on the labors of Google Bots. On any site running Adsense, almost every user is shadowed by a Google Adsense Bot that crawls the page & determines what ads to present. There is no escaping bots on the internet today.
Logging is no obstacle either. There's another site out there (boardreader.com) that basically steals the content of boards & represents it with their advertising. They manually create logins for their bots.
Originally Posted by
bdjohns1
Yep, congrats, Randy. This is what you get for opening FT to Google.
It's been open to Google Bogs
at least since 2004.