They should retroactively penalize hospitals for trying to hide this information as it is clearly against the spirit of the law.
Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#22They should retroactively penalize hospitals for trying to hide this information as it is clearly against the spirit of the law.
The US Constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws. You can punish someone for something that wasn’t a crime when they did it.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#23Typo in headline?
My brain initially parsed "meta robot" as "megarobot" and I was really excited until I got to the last part of the sentence.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#24This will be a fun example of legalism v. Hacker ingenuity. Everytime they figure out a specific legal way to write up a trick to hide prices, the folks will find another loophole to hide them.
Honestly. This could be a fun race to the bottom.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both?
Because wouldn't they have to keep adding new techniques to the list continuously when in the other case they can say in what format the content needs to be available in.
Indexable is open to interpretation. No disallow directives in robots.txt isn't.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#26They should retroactively penalize hospitals for trying to hide this information as it is clearly against the spirit of the law.
The US Constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws. You can punish someone for something that wasn’t a crime when they did it.
Sure. I'm not saying make a new law then punish. I'm saying they should be punished based on the existing law that said prices had to be published. Similar to punishing someone for tax evasion even though the specific technique they used wasn't explicitly enumerated in the law.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search engines can index pdfs.
Provided the content is not encrypted.
I stand corrected: encrypted PDFs are indexed unless a password is set. However, in the past they were unable to do so[0]: "Generally we can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings, provided they're not password protected or encrypted."
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/09/pdfs-in-go...
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#28As I read this, it seems like this is saying that if you are saying that you are posting public pricing information, you should not be hiding that information from search engines.
Seems like it's trying to avoid people (I guess it's targeted toward insurers, if I'm reading the main page correctly) saying that they are transparent about prices but hiding the information so no one sees it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
Re: Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Provided the content is not encrypted.
I stand corrected: encrypted PDFs are indexed unless a password is set. However, in the past they were unable to do so[0]: "Generally we can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings, provided they're not password protected or encrypted." [0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/09/pdfs-in-go...
I think the assumption is that encrypted pdfs would not be used here because users still have to view these documents