TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make tax filing as easy as it should be. It's one of the things I would immediately correct if I was king for a day.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#5

Post by Zenst » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page directly listed. The page in question is https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...

The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is: https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt

Not listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many offerings and a sub from that is the free one.

I'm not seeing the block that the story is on about in search and in robots.txt

What am I missing?

[EDIT ADD] Thank you for all the replies, I see what they did there now.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#6

Post by kbenson » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

czbond wrote: post #2

And this is news worthy, how?

Because there was arecent legislative push for allowing the IRS to do people's taxes for them for the majority of people, since the IRS already has the info to do so. The Tax industry pushes back against that, strongly, and one of the ways they do so is to note how the provide a service to do the taxes for free for people under a certain level of income (I believe as mandated by earlier legislation?). That they purposefully make it hard for people that qualify to find the free service has some bearing on the situation.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#7

Post by danso » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

czbond wrote: post #2

And this is news worthy, how?

Congress is debating a bill that would bar the IRS from creating an official free filing system, and instead, mandate that the IRS have private companies fill that role. The concern has been that private companies use dark patterns to upsell users into buying unnecessary paid features:

https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#8

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

sithlord wrote: post #3

Wouldn't this need to be listed on the disallow on the robots.txt if they didnt want them to index the page?

No. That's one approach, but the page has a meta tag that has the same effect:

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#9

Post by cldellow » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

czbond wrote: post #2

And this is news worthy, how?

The US government has promised TurboTax that the IRS will not create a free e-filing service. In exchange, TurboTax will offer its software for free to some low-income taxpayers.

The US legislature is considering extending this deal.

In light of that, various organizations are exploring how well the current deal is working. In sum: not very well, because TurboTax uses a variety of dark patterns to make it hard for people who are eligible for free services to discover it.

Re: TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines

#10

Post by gsteinb88 » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #5

I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page directly listed. The page in question is https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi... The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is: https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt Not listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many offerings and a sub from that is the free one. I'm not seeing the block that the…

That is not the free file page, and the fact that it tricks you into thinking it is is exactly the point: https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you...