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I was wrong about robots.txt
Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for. My LinkedIn posts became broken Ever since I changed my robots.txt file, I started seeing that my LinkedIn posts no longer had the preview of the article available. I was not sure what the issue was initially, since before then it used to work just fine. In addition to that, I have noticed that LinkedIn’s algorithm has started serving my posts to fewer and fewer connections. I was a bit confused by the issue, thinking that it might have been a temporary problem. But over the next two weeks the missing post previews did not appear.
I plugged in my recent article in the tool and it revealed to me the reason why I could no longer see the previews - the robots.txt file had a directive that would not allow LinkedIn bot to scrape the web pages. We’ve based the initial version of the protocol on RDFa which means that you’ll place additional<meta> tags in the<head> of your web page. Now that I have encountered that issue, it led me to learn more about the Open Graph Protocol and tools like LinkedIn Post Inspector which told me what the problem was.
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