Reddit blocks Microsoft Bing from accessing the site unless it signs a commercial agreement

[Daniel Puchert]

Reddit blocks search engines from crawling site

Reddit has been blocking search engines, including Microsoft's Bing, from accessing the site’s posts and comments unless they sign commercial agreements, following a Reddit policy change that took effect last month.

“We can no longer be completely open because we have to be very considerate of where our data ends up and what it’s used for,” chief executive officer Steve Huffman said in an interview.

 

[PaulMurkin]

And who suffers? The users. Now some people will have to install a different browser. How inconvenient.

 

[Ninja'd]

“We can no longer be completely open because we have to be very considerate of where our data ends up and what it’s used for,” chief executive officer Steve Huffman said in an interview.

Well you should've thought of that before my youtube feed got flooded with robotic voices reading all your posts. Bastards can't even afford a decent AI voice.

 

[Skerminkel]

Interesting. I don't use Reddit often and only land on posts there through Duckduckgo searches, i.e. via Bing.

 

[B-1]

Web traffic from bots/crawlers etc is estimated to be close to 50% of the traffic. Its a huge cost for sites to carry for other businesses essentially taking you data for their own use and profit. This will become more common for the well established sites.

 

[Bliksis]

What happened with the great Reddit shutdown/gone dark/whatever?

Nothing?

 

[r00igev@@r]

When is MyBB going to charge google for crawling this forum? We need free coffee and beers for all our dad jokes and opinions!

 

[Sarg3_ZN]

When is MyBB going to charge google for crawling this forum? When need free coffee and beers for all our dad jokes technical insights and opinions!

ftfy

 

[Fulcrum29]

I don't see an issue with this. Reddit is already visible, they aren't dependent on being crawled to have visibility. Their users, and non-users, are a backlinking machine. It is very hard to block advanced crawlers. Adding a rule in robot.txt isn't a preventative measure, it is a mitigation, and links stay links.

Most websites are dependent on search engines and archiving bots. Reddit doesn't need it. The last thing on their mind is an SEO strategy.

What they do want is to protect their content, their IP or so to speak. You all knew the terms when you created a user account on Reddit. They are in a position to monetize their, or "your", content.

The problem I have is that Google, and them learning AI, is impression based. Impressions are not a good outlook when you train AI on Reddit with content having high-impression counts.

Bing's SEO tools don't measure up to Google's in any case. They are way behind, as is everyone. Baidu SEO is probably better than Bing. It is odd really, because back in the day MS did give it attention. AI is not going to change how users search.

Anyhow, it is all ranking and structure.