Viewing profile — rsbadger

I kept running into the same annoyance: I want to upload a file from a script and just get a link back — without setting up S3 buckets, auth flows, or SDKs. I built a small service…

Unfortunately not - the links were indexed and shown in Bing search results

I do have a robots.txt to block this directory. But Bing only listens to that for what to crawl, not what to index.

I’m fairly certain they are. My links ended up indexed in Bing search results. The only place they were ever rendered was in private emails to users. Bing should not be indexing th…

Exactly that.

This is very useful information. You’d really hope that private emails would be excluded by default…

The only purpose of this link was to verify that the email address is valid. Once it’s verified, you can login.

Many people (most?) prefer to signup to services by email address. To do so, those email addresses must be verified. How would you verify it without sending them an email link?

You’re right that it was a bit of an oversight on my behalf, as the links were only generated after a verified human user action (signup) I had assumed the 1 time links to their em…

I would be pretty mortified if browsers were using user browser sessions to scan content and pass it to bingbot…? What about if you’re browsing something local? Or your bank accoun…

Almost all of them. A good example is Dropbox link you send to someone. I could generate this link to a private file in my Dropbox, email it you, and Bing (may) index it. https://w…

Exactly - seems the safest way is to explicitly block known bots by user agent from even reaching pages you don't want indexed.

You may be seeing a stale version, try this: https://shoprocket.io/robots.txt?bypass=1 (I made a lot of changes today when testing all, including "visit as Bingbot" from their webm…

Quite possibly…

They were indexed in Bing results, I’ve shared the URL of that in this thread

I don't think that's very surprising for most people, the real takeaway is that not only will Bing read your emails, but they may also index any links you send and serve them in se…

Exactly. I also noticed Bing had accessed some non microsoft tokens too. Even gmail accounts were affected. I assume some people have connected their gmail account to the outlook c…

Exactly. From what I've heard today it sounds like most apps have an extra step between the email link and the login, usually a JS step, to check for bots. Not adding that was my d…

AFAIK, most of those "private" links are actually just "unlisted" but they're still public. I'm sure Bing is indexing those too...

Absolutely

Yeh I was a bit reluctant to post that as it doesn't look great for my app! But here's the results: https://www.bing.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fshoprocket.io%2F...

Yeh I think you're right, an extra JS step on the page that the email link leads to would help a lot.

They are now - I didn't think I had to as all the pages are naturally behind a login, it never crossed my mind that Bing would follow email links, let alone index them in search re…